A note on two-times measurement entropy production and modular theory

Abstract

Recent theoretical investigations of the two-times measurement entropy production (2TMEP) in quantum statistical mechanics have shed a new light on the mathematics and physics of the quantum mechanical probabilistic rules. Among notable developments are the extensions of entropic fluctuation relations to the quantum domain and the discovery of a deep link between 2TMEP and modular theory of operator algebras. All these developments concerned the setting where the state of the system at the instant of the first measurement is the same as the state whose entropy production is measured. In this work, we consider the case where these two states are different and link this more general 2TMEP to modular theory. The established connection allows us to show that under general ergodicity assumptions the 2TMEP is essentially independent of the choice of the system state at the instant of the first measurement due to a decoherence effect induced by the first measurement. This stability sheds a new light on the concept of quantum entropy production and, in particular, on possible quantum formulations of the celebrated classical Gallavotti–Cohen Fluctuation Theorem which will be studied in a continuation of this work.