Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation Connects Physics,
Information Science, and Biology

Yoshihiko Hasegawa

Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology,
The University of Tokyo

Wed, March 16 , 2022 - 4:00 PM


Higher precision demands more resources. Although this fact is widely accepted, it has only recently been theoretically proved. The thermodynamic uncertainty relation serves as a theoretical basis for this notion, and it states that current fluctuations are bounded from below by thermodynamic costs, such as entropy production and dynamical activity. In this seminar, I show a strong connection between the
thermodynamic uncertainty relation and information theory by deriving it through information inequality known as a Cramér-Rao bound, which provides the error bound for any statistical estimator. Moreover, by using a quantum Cramér-Rao bound, I derive a quantum extension of thermodynamic uncertainty relation, which holds for general open quantum systems. The thermodynamic uncertainty relation predicts the fundamental limit of biomolecular processes, and thus it can be applied to infer the entropy production, corresponding to the consumption of adenosine triphosphate, of biological systems in the absence of detailed knowledge about them.

 

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