Microcanonical thermodynamics in general physical theories

Understand

Microcanonical thermodynamics studies the operations that can be performed on systems with well-defined energy.

• So far, this approach has been applied to classical and quantum systems.
• Here we extend it to arbitrary physical theories, proposing two requirements for the development of a general microcanonical framework.
• We then formulate three resource theories, corresponding to three different sets of basic operations: i) random reversible operations, resulting from reversible dynamics with fluctuating parameters, ii) noisy operations, generated by the interaction with ancillas in the microcanonical state, and iii) unital operations, defined as the operations that preserve the microcanonical state.