Relations between Dissipated Work and R\'enyi Divergences

Abstract

In this paper, we establish a general relation which directly links the dissipated work done on a system driven arbitrarily far from equilibrium, a fundamental quantity in thermodynamics, and the R\'{e}nyi divergences, a fundamental concept in information theory. Specifically, we find that the generating function of the dissipated work under an arbitrary time-dependent driving process is related to the R\'{e}nyi divergences between a non-equilibrium state in the driven process and a non-equilibrium state in its time reversed process. This relation is a consequence of time reversal symmetry in driven process and is universally applicable to both finite classical system and finite quantum system, arbitrarily far from equilibrium.