title: Dissipation, interaction, and relative entropy.
abstract: Many thermodynamic relations involve inequalities, with equality if a process does not involve dissipation. In this article we provide equalities in which the dissipative contribution is shown to involve the relative entropy (also called the Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions in both classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. As an application, the relative entropy is related to transport coefficients.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire analyse et physique mathématique, 14 avenue Félix Faure, F-75015 Paris, France.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gaveau
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, D-01187 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Granger
authors.affiliation: Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LPTMC, case 121, 4 place Jussieu, F-75252 Paris cedex 05, France.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moreau
authors.affiliation: Physics Department, Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York 13699-5820, USA.
authors.forename: L S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Schulman