Universal Trade-off Between Irreversibility and Relaxation Timescale

Abstract: We establish a general lower bound for the entropy production rate based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the Logarithmic-Sobolev constant that characterizes the time-scale of relaxation. This bound can be considered as an enhanced second law of thermodynamics. As a crucial application, we find a universal trade-off relation between the dissipation rate and relaxation timescale in thermal relaxation. Importantly, we show that a thermodynamic upper bound on the relaxation time between two given states follows directly from the trade-off relation, serving as an inverse speed limit throughout the entire time region. Our findings unveil some hidden universal behaviors of thermal relaxation processes, which can also be extended to open quantum systems.