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  • Open Access

Entropy bounds from quantum thermodynamics

Massimo Giovannini*

  • Department of Physics, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland and INFN, Section of Milan-Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy

  • *Contact author: massimo.giovannini@cern.ch
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Phys. Rev. D 111, 123548 – Published 23 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bpzp-kzwh

Abstract

Within an inherently classical perspective, there is always an unavoidable energy cost associated with the information deletion and this common lore is at the heart of the Landauer conjecture that does not impose, per se, any relevant limit on the information acquisition. Although such a mindset should generally apply to systems of any size, its quantum mechanical implications are particularly intriguing and, for this reason, we examine here a minimal physical structure where the system and the environment are described, respectively, by a pair of quantum oscillators coupled by an appropriate Hermitian interaction able to amplify the entropy of the initial state. Since at the onset of the dynamical evolution the system is originally in a pure state, its entropy variation is always positive semidefinite and the Landauer conjecture should not impose any constraint. Nonetheless, provided the quantum amplification is effective, it turns out that the entropy variation of the system always undershoots the heat transferred to the environment. When the initial thermal state of the environment is characterized by a chemical potential, the entropy growth is bounded both by the particles and by the heat flowing to the environment. The limits deduced in the quantum thermodynamical framework are also scrutinized from a field theory standpoint where species of different spins are copiously produced (especially in a cosmological context) thanks to the rapid variation of the space-time curvature.

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Phys. Rev. D 111, 123548– Published 23 June, 2025
  • Received 17 April 2025
  • Accepted 27 May 2025
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