Related papers: The free energy requirements of biological organis…
Optimisation of heat engines at the micro-scale has applications in biological and artificial nano-technology, and stimulates theoretical research in non-equilibrium statistical physics. Here we consider non-interacting overdamped particles…
Organisms adapt to volatile environments by integrating sensory information with internal memory, yet their information processing is constrained by resource limitations. Such limitations can fundamentally alter optimal estimation…
Landauer erasure seems to provide a powerful link between thermodynamics and information processing (logical computation). The only logical operations that require a generation of heat are logically irreversible ones, with the minimum heat…
The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…
For a small system like a colloidal particle or a single biomolecule embedded in a heat bath, the optimal protocol of an external control parameter minimizes the mean work required to drive the system from one given equilibrium state to…
Recent developments in statistical mechanics have allowed the estimation of equilibrium free energies from the statistics of work measurements during processes that drive the system out of equilibrium. Here a different class of processes is…
The chemical composition of the earths atmosphere far from equilibrium is unique in the solar system and has been attributed to the presence of widespread life. Here I show that this perspective can be quantified using non-equilibrium…
Conventional computing has many sources of heat dissipation, but one of these--the Landauer limit--poses a fundamental lower bound of 1 bit of entropy per bit erased. 'Reversible Computing' avoids this source of dissipation, but is…
The selection of an equilibrium state by maximising the entropy of a system, subject to certain constraints, is often powerfully motivated as an exercise in logical inference, a procedure where conclusions are reached on the basis of…
Microscopic machines utilize free energy to create and maintain out-of-equilibrium organization in virtually all living things. Often this takes the form of converting the free energy stored in nonequilibrium chemical potential differences…
We study a dynamical system with time dependent Hamiltonian by numerical experiments so as to find a relation between thermodynamics and chaotic nature of the system. Excess information loss, defined newly based on Lyapunov analysis, is…
We generalize stochastic thermodynamics to include information reservoirs. Such information reservoirs, which can be modeled as a sequence of bits, modify the second law. For example, work extraction from a system in contact with a single…
Stochastic dynamics with random resetting leads to a non-equilibrium steady state. Here, we consider the thermodynamics of resetting by deriving the first and second law for reset processes far from equilibrium. We identify the…
We introduce an information free energy for thermodynamic systems driven by external time-dependent parameters. We show that the latter is a nonequilibrium state function and that it is a natural generalization of the usual equilibrium and…
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) states that under suitable conditions of weak coupling, random dynamical systems with sufficient degrees of freedom will behave so as to minimize an upper bound, formalized as a variational free energy, on…
Landauer's limit on heat dissipation during information erasure is critical as devices shrink, requiring optimal pure-state preparation to minimise errors. However, Nernst's third law states this demands infinite resources in energy, time,…
Non-Markovian effects in the evolution of open quantum systems have recently attracted widespread interest, particularly in the context of assessing the efficiency of energy and charge transfer in nanoscale biomolecular networks and quantum…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
Giant strides in ultrashort laser pulse technology have enabled real-time observation of dynamical processes in complex molecular systems. Specifically, the discovery of oscillatory transients in the two-dimensional electronic spectra of…
Diverse physical systems are characterized by their response to small perturbations. Near thermodynamic equilibrium, the fluctuation-dissipation theorem provides a powerful theoretical and experimental tool to determine the nature of…