The von Neumann Entropy for Mixed States

Abstract

The Araki–Lieb inequality is commonly used to calculate the entropy of subsystems when they are initially in pure states, as this forces the entropy of the two subsystems to be equal after the complete system evolves. Then, it is easy to calculate the entropy of a large subsystem by finding the entropy of the small one. To the best of our knowledge, there does not exist a way of calculating the entropy when one of the subsystems is initially in a mixed state. For the case of a two-level atom interacting with a quantized field, we show that it is possible to use the Araki–Lieb inequality and find the von Neumann entropy for the large (infinite) system. We show this in the two-level atom-field interaction.

Keywords

• von Neumann entropy
• mixed states
• Araki–Lieb inequality
• atom-field interaction