Anisotropic information geometry of entropy production

Abstract

We reveal that the information geometry of entropy production exhibits an intrinsic anisotropy, providing a unified origin for the inequivalent geometric constraints obeyed by its different components. Using a hierarchical projection structure of quantum relative entropy, we derive an exact orthogonal decomposition of entropy production into three distinct geometric contributions associated with the deviation of the Gibbs projection temperature from the reference temperature, the deviation of the environment from its Gibbs projection state, and system--environment correlations. We demonstrate that these contributions obey fundamentally different geometric bounds: the first reduces to a classical Kullback--Leibler divergence and admits no universal upper bound in terms of the trace distance and the system and environment dimensions alone, whereas the latter two admit rigorous distance-based bounds with dimension-dependent factors. The framework also applies to classical Markovian dynamics described solely in terms of the system state, for which the system--environment correlation contribution is absent from the decomposition. Combining this geometric decomposition with dynamical speed limits, we obtain rigorous bounds on entropy production expressed solely in terms of physically accessible quantities, such as the mean energy and Hamiltonian variance.