Relative Entropy, Interaction Energy and the Nature of Dissipation

Many thermodynamic relations involve inequalities, with equality if a process does not involve dissipation. In this article we provide equalities in which the dissipative contribution is shown to involve the relative entropy (a.k.a. Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions both in classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. By calculating a transport coefficient we show that indeed—at least in this case—the source of dissipation in that coefficient is the relative entropy.