Microcanonical thermodynamics in general physical theories



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PIRSA Number: 
18040091

Abstract

Microcanonical thermodynamics studies the operations that can be performed on systems with well-defined energy. So far, this approach has been applied to classical and quantum systems. Here we extend it to arbitrary physical theories, proposing two requirements for the development of a general microcanonical framework. We then formulate three resource theories, corresponding to three different choices of basic operations. We focus on a class of physical theories, called sharp theories with purification, where these three sets of operations exhibit remarkable properties. In these theories, a necessary condition for thermodynamic transitions is given by a suitable majorisation criterion. This becomes a sufficient condition in all three resource theories if and only if the dynamics allowed by the theory satisfy a condition that we call "unrestricted reversibility". Under this condition, we derive a duality between the resource theory of microcanonical thermodynamics and the resource theory of pure bipartite entanglement.