Thermodynamic cost of locally maintaining a steady state
Abstract
The Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians have short-range conditional correlations. To maintain a steady state with long-range conditional correlations, one might expect that a stochastic process must ``pay'' either in nonlocal moves or entropy production. Surprisingly, we find strictly local Gaussian processes that obey detailed balance and have unique steady states with arbitrarily long-range conditional correlations. We show that such processes must still produce entropy, if implemented using a local quadratic Hamiltonian coupled locally to equilibrium, rapidly relaxing baths. We lower-bound this entropy production in terms of the steady state's conditional mutual information (CMI); if the CMI decays exponentially with distance, the associated length-scale is called the Markov length ξ. The entropy production per site per relaxation time obeys σ̂≥ c ξ2 for large ξ, and with c an implementation-dependent constant. We also bound the tradeoff between coupling range and entropy production. We contrast these Gaussian processes with jump processes on discrete state spaces, for which, under certain irreducibility assumptions, steady states with long-range CMI are only possible if detailed balance is violated. We conjecture (and present evidence) that rapidly mixing local jump processes cannot stabilize steady states with long-range CMI.
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BibTeX
@misc{gopalakrishnan2026thermodynamic,
title = {{Thermodynamic cost of locally maintaining a steady state}},
author = {Sarang Gopalakrishnan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.38925},
eprint = {2610.38925},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38925},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Thermodynamic cost of locally maintaining a steady state
AU - Sarang Gopalakrishnan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.38925
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38925
AB - The Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians have short-range conditional correlations. To maintain a steady state with long-range conditional correlations, one might expect that a stochastic process must ``pay'' either in nonlocal moves or entropy production. Surprisingly, we find strictly local Gaussian processes that obey detailed balance and have unique steady states with arbitrarily long-range conditional correlations. We show that such processes must still produce entropy, if implemented using a local quadratic Hamiltonian coupled locally to equilibrium, rapidly relaxing baths. We lower-bound this entropy production in terms of the steady state's conditional mutual information (CMI); if the CMI decays exponentially with distance, the associated length-scale is called the Markov length ξ. The entropy production per site per relaxation time obeys σ̂≥ c ξ^2 for large ξ, and with c an implementation-dependent constant. We also bound the tradeoff between coupling range and entropy production. We contrast these Gaussian processes with jump processes on discrete state spaces, for which, under certain irreducibility assumptions, steady states with long-range CMI are only possible if detailed balance is violated. We conjecture (and present evidence) that rapidly mixing local jump processes cannot stabilize steady states with long-range CMI.
ER -