ON-LINE QLunch: Peter Harremoes

Thermodynamics exclude super-quantum correlations

The second law of thermodynamics is often considered as one of the most fundamental laws of physics. In this talk I will demonstrate how a version of the second law can be used to exclude violation of Tsirelson's bound. The derivation is done in a generalized probabilistic setting without reference to the usual complex Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics. The version of the second law that we consider is relevant for any convex optimization problem and there are many practical examples where it does not apply. That means that it is a constraint with a specific physical content that is

satisfied quantum theory described using the Hibert space formalism, but it excludes most of the generalized probabilistic theories. The talk will mainly be based on the recent paper arXiv:2002.02895 , but the I will also present some new results.