Improving the Cramér-Rao bound with the detailed fluctuation theorem.

Abstract

In some nonequilibrium systems, the distribution of entropy production p(Σ) satisfies the detailed fluctuation theorem (DFT) p(Σ)/p(-Σ)=exp(Σ). When the distribution p(Σ) shows a time dependence, the celebrated Cramér-Rao (CR) bound asserts that the mean entropy production rate is upper bounded in terms of the variance of Σ and the Fisher information with respect to time. In this paper we employ the DFT to derive an upper bound for the mean entropy production rate that improves the CR bound. We show that this new bound serves as an accurate approximation for the entropy production rate in the heat exchange problem mediated by a weakly coupled bosonic mode. The bound is saturated for the same setup when mediated by a weakly coupled qubit.