In-vivo entropy production of A. subaru
Biological Physics
2026-04-02 v1 Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
Entropy production is often used as a proxy for energy consumption of a non-equilibrium system. Lower bounds can be estimated from coarse-grained observations, and this has been done for various biological systems. Here, we apply these tools to a more macroscopic system whose true energy consumption is also known. We find that while entropy production does give a lower bound, it is some 25 orders of magnitude away from being saturated. To be certain of this result, we survey different methods of estimating irreversibility, and write down a novel kNN estimator.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.00453,
title = {In-vivo entropy production of A. subaru},
author = {Yu Fu and Emmy Dobson and Benjamin B. Machta and Michael C. Abbott},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00453},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
9 pages, 6 figures