Geometric decomposition of information flow: New insights into information thermodynamics

Abstract: We propose a decomposition of information flow into housekeeping and excess components for autonomous bipartite systems subject to Markov jump processes. We introduce this decomposition by using the geometric structure of probability currents and the conjugate thermodynamic forces. The housekeeping component arises from the cyclic modes caused by the detailed balance violations and maintains the correlations between the two subsystems. In contrast, the excess component, is a contribution of conservative forces that alters the mutual information between the two subsystems. With this decomposition, we generalize previous results, such as the second law of information thermodynamics, the cyclic decomposition, and the information-thermodynamic extensions of thermodynamic trade-off relations.