Physical-Work Fluctuation Relations from Accessible Quantum Macrostates
Abstract
Jarzynski's equality recovers an equilibrium free-energy difference from nonequilibrium work trajectories, but its exponential average can converge very slowly because rare trajectories carry large weight. We show that coarse thermodynamic information measured at the nonequilibrium endpoint can reduce this sampling burden while keeping the same microscopic trajectories and the same free-energy target. The endpoint mean energy and a coarse spatial record define a maximum-entropy state and select one member of an exact family of fluctuation relations. That physically selected member provides an exact statistical control for the ordinary Jarzynski estimator, even when the final energy and retained record do not commute. In a finite Bose--Hubbard system, this control substantially lowers the finite-confidence sampling cost, while a small controlled departure from exact endpoint matching produces a square-root information--sampling tradeoff.
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BibTeX
@misc{ahmadi2026physicalwork,
title = {{Physical-Work Fluctuation Relations from Accessible Quantum Macrostates}},
author = {Borhan Ahmadi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.00246},
eprint = {2610.00246},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00246},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Physical-Work Fluctuation Relations from Accessible Quantum Macrostates
AU - Borhan Ahmadi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.00246
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00246
AB - Jarzynski's equality recovers an equilibrium free-energy difference from nonequilibrium work trajectories, but its exponential average can converge very slowly because rare trajectories carry large weight. We show that coarse thermodynamic information measured at the nonequilibrium endpoint can reduce this sampling burden while keeping the same microscopic trajectories and the same free-energy target. The endpoint mean energy and a coarse spatial record define a maximum-entropy state and select one member of an exact family of fluctuation relations. That physically selected member provides an exact statistical control for the ordinary Jarzynski estimator, even when the final energy and retained record do not commute. In a finite Bose--Hubbard system, this control substantially lowers the finite-confidence sampling cost, while a small controlled departure from exact endpoint matching produces a square-root information--sampling tradeoff.
ER -