Related papers: The free energy requirements of biological organis…
Physical systems are often simulated using a stochastic computation where different final states result from identical initial states. Here, we derive the minimum energy cost of simulating a complex data set of a general physical system…
The living cell uses a variety of molecular receptors to read and process chemical signals that vary in space and time. We model the dynamics of such molecular level measurements as Markov processes in steady state, with a coupling between…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Active matter generates order or patterns through nonequilibrium dynamics. An open research challenge is to determine how efficiently a nonequilibrium self-organising system can convert consumed energy into macroscopic order. We study an…
Photosynthesis converts sunlight into the chemical free energy that feeds the Earth's biosphere, yet at levels much lower than what thermodynamics would allow for. I propose here that photosynthesis is nevertheless thermodynamically…
The processing of quantum information always has a cost in terms of physical resources such as energy or time. Determining the resource requirements is not only an indispensable step in the design of practical devices - the resources need…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Understanding the thermodynamics of radiation and the quantum-mechanical interactions between light and matter is important both for theoretical purposes and for technological advances, such as determining the limits of key processes like…
A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations,…
Biological systems process information under noisy environment. Sensory adaptation model of E. coli is suitable for investigation because of its simplicity. To understand the adaptation processing quantitatively, stochastic thermodynamic…
Living systems operate far from thermal equilibrium by converting the chemical potential of ATP into mechanical work to achieve growth, replication or locomotion. Given time series observations of intra-, inter- or multicellular processes,…
The existing concept of the "fitness value of information" provides a theoretical upper bound on the fitness advantage of using information concerning a fluctuating environment. Using concepts from rate-distortion theory, we develop a…
We study continuity, and lack thereof, of thermodynamical properties for one-dimensional dynamical systems. Under quite general hypotheses, the free energy is shown to be almost upper-semicontinuous: some normalised component of a limit…
With the help of metadynamics it is possible to calculate efficiently the free energy of systems displaying high energy barriers as a function of few selected "collective variables". In doing this, the contribution of all the other degrees…
Quantifying energy flows at nanometer scales promises to guide future research in a variety of disciplines, from microscopic control and manipulation, to autonomously operating molecular machines. A general understanding of the…
The productivity of a planetary biosphere is limited by how its free-energy budget is partitioned between maintaining a habitable environment, driving metabolism, and processing heritable information. We derive an upper bound on net primary…
Biomolecules stochastically occupy different possible configurations with probabilities given by non-equilibrium steady-state distributions. These distributions are determined by the transition rate constants between different…
The free energy principle (FEP) is a mathematical framework that describes how biological systems self-organize and survive in their environment. This principle provides insights on multiple scales, from high-level behavioral and cognitive…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Living organisms are not just random collections of organic molecules. There is continuous information processing going on in the apparent bouncing around of molecules of life. Optimisation criteria in this information processing can be…