Related papers: The free energy requirements of biological organis…
Molecular machines transduce free energy between different forms throughout all living organisms. While truly machines in their own right, unlike their macroscopic counterparts molecular machines are characterized by stochastic…
One of the primary motivations of the research in the field of computation is to optimize the cost of computation. The major ingredient that a computer needs is the energy to run a process, i.e., the thermodynamic cost. The analysis of the…
The free energy principle (FEP) states that any dynamical system can be interpreted as performing Bayesian inference upon its surrounding environment. In this work, we examine in depth the assumptions required to derive the FEP in the…
The clean world of digital information is based on noisy physical devices. Landauer's principle provides a deep connection between information processing and the underlying thermodynamics by setting a lower limit on the energy consumption…
Many biological functions require the dynamics to be necessarily driven out-of-equilibrium. In contrast, in various contexts, a nonequilibrium dynamics at fast timescales can be described by an effective equilibrium dynamics at a slower…
We study a class of non-equilibrium quasi-stationary states for a Markov system interacting with two different thermal baths. We show that the work done under a slow, external change of parameters admits a potential, i.e., the free energy.…
In thermodynamics one considers thermal systems and the maximization of entropy subject to the conservation of energy. A consequence is Landauer's erasure principle, which states that the erasure of 1 bit of information requires a minimum…
Biological sensory systems, from \textit{E.~coli} chemotaxis to sensory neurons in \textit{C.~elegans}, achieve reliable adaptation over wide dynamic ranges despite operating in strongly noisy and overdamped regimes. Here, we present a…
Living systems need to be highly responsive, and also to keep fluctuations low. These goals are incompatible in equilibrium systems due to the Fluctuation Dissipation Theorem (FDT). Here, we show that biological sensory systems, driven far…
Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they dissipate heat, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced…
The second law of thermodynamics uses change in free energy of macroscopic systems to set a bound on performed work. Ergotropy plays a similar role in microscopic scenarios, and is defined as the maximum amount of energy that can be…
We measured the energy efficiency of information erasure using silicon DRAM cells capable of counting charges on capacitors at the single-electron level. Our measurements revealed that the efficiency decreased as the erasure error…
We derive the optimal estimates of the free energies of an arbitrary number of thermodynamic states from nonequilibrium work measurements; the work data are collected from forward and reverse switching processes and obey a fluctuation…
Framing computation as the transformation of metastable memories, we explore its fundamental thermodynamic limits. The true power of information follows from a novel decomposition of nonequilibrium free energy derived here, which provides a…
One of the primary computational requirements of a cellular system is the ability to transfer information between spatially separated components. To accomplish this, biology uses diverse physical channels including production or release of…
The rapid growth of deep neural networks (DNNs) has brought increasing attention to their energy use during training and inference. Here, we establish the thermodynamic bounds on energy consumption in quasi-static analog DNNs by mapping…
The energy cost of erasing a bit of information was fundamentally lower bounded by Landauer, in terms of the temperature of its environment: $W\geq k_\mathrm{B} T \ln 2$. However, in real electronic devices, the information-bearing system…
The extension of thermodynamic principles to active matter remains a challenge due to the non-equilibrium nature inherent to active systems. In this study, we introduce a framework to assess entropy in our minimal macroscopic experiment…
Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we propose an information-theoretic formalization of bounded rational decision-making…
Modern computing architectures are vastly more energy-dissipative than fundamental thermodynamic limits suggest, motivating the search for principled approaches to low-dissipation logical operations. We formulate multi-bit logical gates…