Emergent second law for non-equilibrium steady states

Abstract: The Gibbs distribution universally characterizes states of thermal equilibrium. In order to extend the Gibbs distribution to non-equilibrium steady states, one must relate the self-information $\mathcal{I}(x) = -\log(P_\text{ss}(x))$ of microstate $x$ to measurable physical quantities. This is a central problem in non-equilibrium statistical physics. By considering open systems described by stochastic dynamics which become deterministic in the macroscopic limit, we show that changes $\Delta \mathcal{I} = \mathcal{I}(x_t) - \mathcal{I}(x_0)$ in steady state self-information along deterministic trajectories can be bounded by the macroscopic entropy production $\Sigma$. This bound takes the form of an emergent second law $\Sigma + k_b \Delta \mathcal{I}\geq 0$, which contains the usual second law $\Sigma \geq 0$ as a corollary, and is saturated in the linear regime close to equilibrium. We thus obtain a tighter version of the second law of thermodynamics that provides a link between the deterministic relaxation of a system and the non-equilibrium fluctuations at steady state. In addition to its fundamental value, our result leads to novel methods for computing non-equilibrium distributions, providing a deterministic alternative to Gillespie simulations or spectral methods.