It has been shown that contact geometry is the proper framework underlying classical thermodynamics and that thermodynamic fluctuations are captured by an additional metric structure related to Fisher's Information Matrix. In this work we analyze several unaddressed aspects about the application of contact and metric geometry to thermodynamics. We consider here the Thermodynamic Phase Space and start by investigating the role of gauge transformations and Legendre symmetries for metric contact manifolds and their significance in thermodynamics. Then we present a novel mathematical characterization of first order phase transitions as equilibrium processes on the Thermodynamic Phase Space for which the Legendre symmetry is broken. Moreover, we use contact Hamiltonian dynamics to represent thermodynamic processes in a way that resembles the classical Hamiltonian formulation of conservative mechanics and we show that the relevant Hamiltonian coincides with the irreversible entropy production along thermodynamic processes. Therefore, we use such property to give a geometric definition of thermodynamically admissible fluctuations according to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Finally, we show that the length of a curve describing a thermodynamic process measures its entropy production.

We present a thorough analysis on the invariance of the most widely used metrics in the Geometrothermodynamics (GTD) programme. We centre our attention in the invariance of the curvature of the space of equilibrium states under a change of fundamental representation. Assuming that the systems under consideration can be described by a fundamental relation which is a homogeneous function of a definite order, we demonstrate that such invariance is only compatible with total Legendre transformations in the present form of the programme. We give the explicit form of a metric which is invariant under total Legendre transformations and whose induced metric produces a curvature which is independent of the fundamental representation. Finally, we study a generic system with two degrees of freedom and whose fundamental relation is homogeneous of order one.Comment: Accepted in Journal of Mathematical Physic

We use the gauge/gravity correspondence to calculate the rate of photon production in a strongly coupled N = 4 plasma in the presence of an intense magnetic field. We start by constructing a family of back reacted geometries that include the black D3-brane solution, as a smooth limiting case for B = 0, and extends to backgrounds with an arbitrarily large constant magnetic field. This family provides the gravitational dual of a field theory in the presence of a very strong magnetic field which intensity can be fixed as desired and allows us to study its effect on the photon production of a quark-gluon plasma. The inclusion of perturbations in the electromagnetic field on these backgrounds is consistent only if the metric is perturbed as well, so we use methods developed to treat operator mixing to manage these general perturbations. Our results show a clear enhancement of photon production with a significant anisotropy, which, in qualitative agreement with the experiments of heavy ion collisions, is particularly noticeable for low P.

Over the last few years, Planck-scale modifications to particles' dispersion relation have been deeply studied for the possibility to formulate some phenomenology of Planckian effects in astrophysical and cosmological frameworks. There are some indications [arXiv:gr-qc/0611024] that Finsler geometry can provide some generalization of Riemannian geometry which may allow to account for non-trivial (Planckian) structure of relativistic particles' configuration space. We investigate the possibility to formalize Planck-scale deformations to relativistic models in curved spacetime, within the framework of Finsler geometry. We take into account the general strategy of analysis of dispersion relations modifications in curved spacetimes proposed in [arXiv:1507.02056], generalizing to the de Sitter case the results obtained in [arXiv:1407.8143], for deformed relativistic particle kinematics in flat spacetime using Finsler formalism.

In this work we consider thermodynamic geometries defined as Hessians of different potentials and derive some useful formulae that show their complementary role in the description of thermodynamic systems with two degrees of freedom that show ensemble nonequivalence. From the expressions derived for the metrics, we can obtain the curvature scalars in a very simple and compact form. We explain here the reason why each curvature scalar diverges over the line of divergence of one of the specific heats. This application is of special interest in the study of changes of stability in black holes as defined by Davies. From these results we are able to prove on a general footing a conjecture first formulated by Liu, L\"u, Luo and Shao stating that different Hessian metrics can correspond to different behaviors in the various ensembles. We study the case of two thermodynamic dimensions. Moreover, comparing our result with the more standard turning point method developed by Poincar\'e, we obtain that the divergence of the scalar curvature of the Hessian metric of one potential exactly matches the change of stability in the corresponding ensemble.Comment: 8 pages, version with major change