Legendre submanifolds in contact manifolds as attractors and geometric nonequilibrium thermodynamics

Abstract: It has been proposed that equilibrium thermodynamics is described on Legendre submanifolds in contact geometry. It is shown in this paper that Legendre submanifolds embedded in a contact manifold can be expressed as attractors in phase space for a certain class of contact Hamiltonian vector fields. By giving a physical interpretation that points outside the Legendre submanifold can represent nonequilibrium states of thermodynamic variables, in addition to that points of a given Legendre submanifold can represent equilibrium states of the variables, this class of contact Hamiltonian vector fields is physically interpreted as a class of relaxation processes, in which thermodynamic variables achieve an equilibrium state from a nonequilibrium state through a time evolution, a typical nonequilibrium phenomenon. Geometric properties of such vector fields on contact manifolds are characterized after introducing a metric tensor field on a contact manifold. It is also shown that a contact manifold and a strictly convex function induce a lower dimensional dually flat space used in information geometry where a geometrization of equilibrium statistical mechanics is constructed. Legendre duality on contact manifolds is explicitly stated throughout.