Geometrical and Operational Aspects of Irreversibility

Abstract

In the statistical description of dynamical systems, an indication of the irreversibility of a given state change is given geometrically by means of a (pre-)ordering of state pairs. Reversible state changes of classical and quantum systems are shown to be represented by isometric state transformations. An operational distinction between reversible and irreversible dynamics is given and related to the geometric characterisation of the associated state transformations.