Related papers: Life efficiency does not always increase with the …
At molecular scales, fluctuations play a significant role and prevent biomolecular processes from always proceeding in a preferred direction, raising the question of how limited amounts of free energy can be dissipated to obtain directed…
Living systems efficiently use chemical fuel to do work, process information, and assemble patterns despite thermal noise. Whether high efficiency arises from general principles or specific fine-tuning is unknown. Here, applying a recent…
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 excess work required to drive a stochastic system out of thermodynamic equilibrium through a time-dependent external perturbation is directly related to the amount of entropy produced during the driving process, allowing excess work and…
Life is commonly described as a self-organized, far-from-equilibrium process that maintains internal order by consuming free energy and exporting entropy. This thermodynamic view underlies diverse theoretical frameworks -- from autopoiesis…
There is a relation between the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes as expressed by the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, and the entropy production in such processes. We explain on an elementary mathematical level the relations…
Time-reversal symmetry breaking and entropy production are universal features of nonequilibrium phenomena. Despite its importance in the physics of active and living systems, the entropy production of systems with many degrees of freedom…
Non-reciprocal interactions are present in many systems out of equilibrium. The rate of entropy production is a measure that quantifies the time irreversibility of a system, and thus how far it is from equilibrium. In this work, we…
Systems coupled to multiple thermodynamic reservoirs can exhibit nonequilibrium dynamics, breaking detailed balance to generate currents. To power these currents, the entropy of the reservoirs increases. The rate of entropy production, or…
We show that under local detailed balance the expected entropy production rate is always bounded in terms of the dynamical activity. The activity refers to the time-symmetric contribution in the action functional for path-space…
Identifying dissipation is essential for understanding the physical mechanisms underlying nonequilibrium processes. {In living systems, for example, the dissipation is directly related to the hydrolysis of fuel molecules such as adenosine…
Biological and engineered systems operate by coupling function to the transfer of heat and/or particles down a thermal or chemical gradient. In idealized \textit{deterministically} driven systems, thermodynamic control can be exerted…
Overdamped stochastic systems maintained far from equilibrium can display sustained oscillations with fluctuations that decrease with the system size. The correlation time of such noisy limit cycles expressed in units of the cycle period is…
For continuous-space diffusion processes, there is a strong connection between conservative forces and entropy production. For a given time evolution of the system's state, the entropy production is minimized when the system is driven by a…
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…
The connection between dissipation and symmetry breaking is a long-standing enigma in statistical physics. It is intimately connected to the quest of a non-equilibrium functional whose minimization gives the non-equilibrium steady state…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
The high accuracy exhibited by biological information transcription processes is due to kinetic proofreading, i.e., by a mechanism which reduces the error rate of the information-handling process by driving it out of equilibrium. We provide…
Near equilibrium, thermodynamic intuition suggests that fast, irreversible processes will dissipate more energy and entropy than slow, quasistatic processes connecting the same initial and final states. Here, we test the hypothesis that…
The concept of entropy in nonequilibrium macroscopic systems is investigated in the light of an extended equation of motion for the density matrix obtained in a previous study. It is found that a time-dependent information entropy can be…