Related papers: Scale-dependent irreversibility in living matter
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
Essential life processes take place across multiple space and time scales in living organisms but understanding their mechanistic interactions remains an ongoing challenge. Advanced multiscale modeling techniques are providing new…
Thermodynamic irreversibility is a fundamental concept in statistical physics, yet its experimental measurement remains challenging, especially for complex systems. We introduce a novel random coarse-graining framework to identify…
This article aims at revisiting, with the aid of simple and neat numerical examples, some of the basic features of macroscopic irreversibility, and, thus, of the mechanical foundation of the second principle of thermodynamics as drawn by…
Recent studies on the phenomenology of ageing in certain many-particle systems which are at a critical point of their non-equilibrium steady-states, are reviewed. Examples include the contact process, the parity-conserving…
In stochastic thermodynamics, the entropy production of a thermodynamic system is defined by the irreversibility measured by the logarithm of the ratio of the path probabilities in the forward and reverse processes. We derive the relation…
The efficient manipulation of thermodynamic states within the finite time is fundamentally constrained by the intrinsic dissipative cost. While the slow-driving regime is well-characterized by a universal $1/\tau$-scaling of…
Irreversibility and acausality of a sub-system are established in exactly soluble harmonic models with reversible and causal dynamics. It is shown that initial conditions, imposed on some dynamical degrees of freedom may break time reversal…
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…
The hallmark of active matter is the autonomous directed motion of its microscopic constituents driven by consumption of energy resources. This leads to the emergence of large scale dynamics and structures without any equilibrium…
Probing the spatially heterogeneous activity across scales is a major challenge in living matter. Energy injection at diverse length scales leads to mode coupling, inter-modal energy transfer, and entropy production. We demonstrate the…
The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used to…
Spatially confined rigid membranes reorganize their morphology in response to the imposed constraints. A crumpled elastic sheet presents a complex pattern of random folds focusing the deformation energy while compressing a membrane resting…
We obtain macroscopic isothermal thermodynamic transformations by space-time scalings of a microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics in contact with a heat bath. The microscopic dynamics is given by a chain of anharmonic oscillators subject to a…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
The dynamics of irreversible relaxation of non-equilibrium macroscopic systems is discussed. Arguments are developed showing that the general process is supported by two independent successive mechanisms. One is mixing and it follows pure…
A fundamental assumption in our understanding of material rheology is that when microscopic deformations are reversible, the material responds elastically to external loads. Plasticity, i.e. dissipative and irreversible macroscopic changes…
This paper analyses the turbulent energy cascade from the perspective of statistical mechanics, and relates inter-scale energy fluxes to statistical irreversibility and information-entropy production. The microscopical reversibility of the…