Related papers: Optimal discrete control: minimizing dissipation i…
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…
Nonequilibrium physics encompasses a broad range of natural and synthetic small-scale systems. Optimizing transitions of such systems will be crucial for the development of nanoscale technologies and may reveal the physical principles…
Transferring a physical system from an initial to a final state while minimizing energetic losses is an interdisciplinary control problem that bridges stochastic thermodynamics and optimal transport theory. Recent research typically…
Micro- and nano-scale systems driven by rapid changes in control parameters (control protocols) dissipate significant energy. In the fast-protocol limit, we find that protocols that minimize dissipation at fixed duration are universally…
Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…
Chemical processes in closed systems are poorly controllable since they always relax to equilibrium. Living systems avoid this fate and give rise to a much richer diversity of phenomena by operating under nonequilibrium conditions. Recent…
Biomolecular machines consume free energy to break symmetry and make directed progress. Nonequilibrium ATP concentrations are the typical free energy source, with one cycle of a molecular machine consuming a certain number of ATP, providing…
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…
The optimal control of a mechanical system is of crucial importance in many realms. Typical examples are the determination of a time-minimal path in vehicle dynamics, a minimal energy trajectory in space mission design, or optimal motion…
How much free energy is irreversibly lost during a thermodynamic process? For deterministic protocols, lower bounds on energy dissipation arise from the thermodynamic friction associated with pushing a system out of equilibrium in finite…
Information processing machines at the nanoscales are unavoidably affected by thermal fluctuations. Efficient design requires understanding how nanomachines can operate at minimal energy dissipation. In this letter we focus on mechanical…
To achieve efficient and reliable control of microscopic systems one should look for driving protocols that mitigate both the average dissipation and stochastic fluctuations in work. This is especially important in fast driving regimes in…
Self-assembly, the process by which interacting components form well-defined and often intricate structures, is typically thought of as a spontaneous process arising from equilibrium dynamics. When a system is driven by external…
Chemical reactions modeled by ordinary differential equations are finite-dimensional dissipative dynamical systems with multiple time-scales. They are numerically hard to tackle -- especially when they enter an optimal control problem as…
We review recent progress in optimal control in stochastic thermodynamics. Theoretical advances provide in-depth insight into minimum-dissipation control with either full or limited (parametric) control, and spanning the limits from slow to…
The development of sophisticated experimental means to control nanoscale systems has motivated efforts to design driving protocols which minimize the energy dissipated to the environment. Computational models are a crucial tool in this…
A central goal of thermodynamics is to identify optimal processes during which the least amount of energy is dissipated into the environment. Generally, even for simple systems, such as the parametric harmonic oscillator, optimal control…
Advances in experimental techniques enable the precise manipulation of a large variety of active systems, which constantly dissipate energy to sustain nonequilibrium phenomena without any equilibrium equivalent. To design novel materials…
In this letter, we study the energy-optimal control of nonlinear port-Hamiltonian (pH) systems in discrete time. For continuous-time pH systems, energy-optimal control problems are strictly dissipative by design. This property, stating that…
Single-molecule experiments have found near-perfect thermodynamic efficiency in the rotary motor F1-ATP synthase. To help elucidate the principles underlying nonequilibrium energetic efficiency in such stochastic machines, we investigate…