Concavity and other properties of the entropy on manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we establish systematic estimates for the entropy and its density on Riemannian manifolds, focusing on the more challenging cases where the Ricci curvature changes sign or the boundary is nonconvex. For example, the refined 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in a compact domain in $\mathbb R^n$ is increasing in time, furthermore, it is concave if the domain is convex. The concavity property is equivalent to the property that the Fisher information is decreasing, which also holds for convex domains in a Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature (cf. \cite{NiLei}). In view of the wide application of entropy in mathematics, information theory, physics, etc., there is certain desire in the community to extend the property to broader settings, especially to the case with nonconvex boundary (see e.g. \cite[p. 3]{CFM}). Here, we prove that the refined 2nd law still holds if the domain is not too far from convex and the negative part of the Ricci curvature is not too large, in an explicit, nonperturbative sense. The proof is based on a recent 2nd order log Poincaré inequality that does not require explicit curvature conditions of the manifold. If the negative part of the Ricci curvature is too large, a counterexample to the concavity is given. Some other related estimates for the entropy density (Hamilton type estimates) are also proven.