Legendre submanifolds in contact manifolds as attractors and geometric nonequilibrium thermodynamics
- Institute for Molecular Science, 38 Nishigo-Naka, Myodaiji, Okazaki 444-8585 (Japan)
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.
- OSTI ID:
- 22479581
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Mathematical Physics, Vol. 56, Issue 7; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0022-2488
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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