Phase space gradient of dissipated work and information: A role of relative Fisher information

Abstract

We show that an information theoretic distance measured by the relative Fisher information between canonical equilibrium phase densities corresponding to forward and backward processes is intimately related to the gradient of the dissipated work in phase space. We present a universal constraint on it via the logarithmic Sobolev inequality. Furthermore, we point out that a possible expression of the lower bound indicates a deep connection in terms of the relative entropy and the Fisher information of the canonical distributions.