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 second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in a compact domain in ℝn 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}), even in the Euclidean case. Here, we prove that the refined second 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, thus realizing some of the expectations. The proof is based on a new, sharp second 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.
Related
- Recursive overlap Bernoulli distributions and an entropy concavity conjecture
- Near-Gaussian counterexamples to the Ball-Nayar-Tkocz entropy concavity conjecture
- Concavity Properties of Robin Solutions on C3,1 Uniformly Convex Domains
- Algebraic entropy of birational automorphism groups in families of hyper-Kähler manifolds
- Measures of maximal entropy for meromorphic maps on compact Kähler manifolds
BibTeX
@misc{fu2026concavity,
title = {{Concavity and other properties of the entropy on manifolds}},
author = {Xuenan Fu and Juanling Lu and Qi S. Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.27327},
eprint = {2608.27327},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27327},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Concavity and other properties of the entropy on manifolds
AU - Xuenan Fu
AU - Juanling Lu
AU - Qi S. Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.27327
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27327
AB - 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 second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in a compact domain in 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}), even in the Euclidean case. Here, we prove that the refined second 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, thus realizing some of the expectations. The proof is based on a new, sharp second 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.
ER -