Related papers: Nonequilibrium Physics in Biology
Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and…
Classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics describe systems in which nothing interacts with nothing. Even the highly refined theory of simple fluids does not deal very well with electrical interactions, boundary conditions, or…
Identifying the origin of nonequilibrium characteristics in a generic interacting system having multiple degrees of freedom is a challenging task. In this context, information theoretic measures such as mutual information and related…
We derive a formulation of the First Law of nonequilibrium thermodynamics for biological information-processing systems by partitioning entropy in the Second Law into microscopic and mesoscopic components and by assuming that natural…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
A hallmark of living systems is the ability to employ a common set of versatile building blocks that can self-organize into a multitude of different structures, in a way that can be controlled with minimal cost. This capability can only be…
Calculations of nonequilibrium processes become increasingly feasable in quantum field theory from first principles. There has been important progress in our analytical understanding based on 2PI generating functionals. In addition, for the…
We show that active transport processes in biological systems can be understood through a local equilibrium description formulated at the mesoscale, the scale to describe stochastic processes. This new approach uses the method established…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Far-from-equilibrium phenomena are critical to all natural and engineered systems, and essential to biological processes responsible for life. For over a century and a half, since Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs, among many…
The nonequilibrium phase transition in a system of diffusing, coagulating particles in the presence of a steady input and evaporation of particles is studied. The system undergoes a transition from a phase in which the average number of…
Topological protection has emerged as an organizing principle for understanding and engineering robust collective behavior in electronic and material systems. Recent work suggests that topology may also play a role in organizing stochastic…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
Nonequilibrium steady state of isothermal biochemical cycle kinetics has been extensively studied, but much less investigated under non-isothermal conditions. However, once the heat exchange between subsystems is rather slow, the isothermal…
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…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
The theory of large deviations has been applied successfully in the last 30 years or so to study the properties of equilibrium systems and to put the foundations of equilibrium statistical mechanics on a clearer and more rigorous footing. A…
In active systems, whose constituents have non-equilibrium dynamics at local level, fluid-fluid phase separation is widely observed. Examples include the formation of membraneless organelles within cells; the clustering of self-propelled…