Fluctuation-dissipation relations for thermodynamic distillation processes

The fluctuation-dissipation theorem is a fundamental result in statistical physics that establishes a connection between the response of a system subject to a perturbation and the fluctuations associated with observables in equilibrium. Here we derive its version within a resource-theoretic framework, where one investigates optimal quantum state transitions under thermodynamic constraints. More precisely, for a fixed transformation error, we prove a relation between the minimal amount of free energy dissipated in a thermodynamic distillation process and the free energy fluctuations of the initial state of the system. Our results apply to initial states given by either asymptotically many identical pure systems or arbitrary number of independent energy-incoherent systems, and allow not only for a state transformation, but also for the change of Hamiltonian. The fluctuation-dissipation relations we derive enable us to find the optimal performance of thermodynamic protocols such as work extraction, information erasure and thermodynamically-free communication, up to second-order asymptotics in the number $N$ of processed systems. We thus provide a first rigorous analysis of these thermodynamic protocols for quantum states with coherence between different energy eigenstates in the intermediate regime of large but finite N.

This talk is based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11759