Thermodynamic holography

TL;DR

This paper reveals that thermodynamics exhibits a holographic principle where a system's entire thermodynamic information can be reconstructed from boundary data, with implications for nano-scale systems and many-body physics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the partition function in thermodynamics is an analytic function, enabling holographic reconstruction of thermodynamic properties from boundary values.

Findings

Partition function is analytic in all physical parameters.

Thermodynamic properties can be reconstructed from boundary data.

Applications to nano-scale systems and many-body physics.

Abstract

The holographic principle states that the information about a volume of a system is encoded on the boundary surface of the volume. Holography appears in many branches of physics, such as optics, electromagnetism, many-body physics, quantum gravity, and string theory. Here we show that holography is also an underlying principle in thermodynamics, a most important foundation of physics. The thermodynamics of a system is fully determined by its partition function. We prove that the partition function of a physical system is an analytic function of all the physical parameters, and therefore its values in any area on the complex plane of a physical parameter are uniquely determined by its values along the boundary. The thermodynamic holography has applications in studying thermodynamics of nano-scale systems (such as molecule engines, nano-generators and macromolecules) and provides a new approach to many-body physics.