Dissipation, interaction, and relative entropy.

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 (also called the Kullback-Leibler divergence). The processes considered are general time evolutions in both classical and quantum mechanics, and the initial state is sometimes thermal, sometimes partially so. As an application, the relative entropy is related to transport coefficients.