title: Thermodynamic holography.
abstract: The holographic principle states that the information about a volume of a system is encoded on the boundary surface of the volume. Holography appears in many branches of physics, such as optics, electromagnetism, many-body physics, quantum gravity, and string theory. Here we show that holography is also an underlying principle in thermodynamics, a most important foundation of physics. The thermodynamics of a system is fully determined by its partition function. We prove that the partition function of a finite but arbitrarily large system is an analytic function on the complex plane of physical parameters, and therefore the partition function in a region on the complex plane is uniquely determined by its values along the boundary. The thermodynamic holography has applications in studying thermodynamics of nano-scale systems (such as molecule engines, nano-generators and macromolecules) and provides a new approach to many-body physics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Centre for Quantum Coherence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Bo-Bo
authors.initials: BB
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Centre for Quantum Coherence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Zhan-Feng
authors.initials: ZF
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Centre for Quantum Coherence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.|Institute of Theoretical Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Ren-Bao
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Liu