Statistical Physics and Information Theory

This monograph is based on lecture notes of a graduate course, which focuses on the relations between information theory and statistical physics. The course was delivered at the Technion during the Spring of 2010 for the first time, and its target audience consists of EE graduate students in the area of communications and information theory, as well as graduate students in Physics who have basic background in information theory. Strong emphasis is given to the analogy and parallelism between information theory and statistical physics, as well as to the insights, the analysis tools and techniques that can be borrowed from statistical physics and ‘imported’ to certain problem areas in information theory. This is a research trend that has been very active in the last few decades, and the hope is that by exposing the students to the meeting points between these two disciplines, their background and perspective may be expanded and enhanced. This monograph is substantially revised and expanded relative to an earlier version posted in arXiv (1006.1565v1 [cs.iT]).