Quantum Coarse-Graining: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Thermodynamics

Understand

We investigate fundamental connections between thermodynamics and quantum information theory.

• First, we show that the operational framework of thermal operations is nonequivalent to the framework of Gibbs-preserving maps, and we comment on this gap.
• We then introduce a fully information-theoretic framework generalizing the above by making further abstraction of physical quantities such as energy.
• It is technically convenient to work with and reproduces known results for finite-size quantum thermodynamics.