Related papers: Nonequilibrium energetics of sensing and actuation…
The study of motility control by smart agents offers a promising platform for systematically exploring the fundamental physical constraints underlying the functioning of bio-inspired micro-machines operating far from equilibrium. Here, we…
A challenge in designing self-assembling building blocks is to ensure the target state is both thermodynamically stable and kinetically accessible. These two objectives are known to be typically in competition, but it is not known how to…
Active matter is rapidly becoming a key paradigm of out-of-equilibrium soft matter exhibiting complex collective phenomena, yet the thermodynamics of such systems remain poorly understood. In this letter we study the nonequilbrium…
In this paper, we derive a number of inequalities which express power-efficiency trade-offs that hold generally for thermodynamic machines operating in non-equilibrium stationary states. One of these inequalities concerns the output power,…
Active systems evade the rules of equilibrium thermodynamics by constantly dissipating energy at the level of their microscopic components. This energy flux stems from the conversion of a fuel, present in the environment, into sustained…
Active matter generates order or patterns through nonequilibrium dynamics. An open research challenge is to determine how efficiently a nonequilibrium self-organising system can convert consumed energy into macroscopic order. We study an…
A longstanding challenge in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is to predict the emergence of self-organized behaviours and functionalities typical of living matter. Despite the progress with classical complex systems, it remains far from…
Self-propulsion allows living systems to display unusual collective behavior. Unlike passive systems in thermal equilibrium, active matter systems are not constrained by conventional thermodynamic laws. A question arises however as to what…
We study thermodynamic limits when controllers operate with only partial observability of internal correlations in multipartite systems. Understanding the costs imposed by lack of information is crucial in settings where agents must act…
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…
Active constituents burn fuel to sustain individual motion, giving rise to collective effects that are not seen in systems at thermal equilibrium, such as phase separation with purely repulsive interactions. There is a great potential in…
A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations,…
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…
Active particles break out of thermodynamic equilibrium thanks to their directed motion, which leads to complex and interesting behaviors in the presence of confining potentials. When dealing with active nanoparticles, however, the…
The study of thermal heat engines was pivotal to establishing the principles of equilibrium thermodynamics, with implications far wider than only engine optimization. For nonequilibrium systems, which by definition dissipate energy even at…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
Intelligent behavior in life-like systems often arises from the ability to gather, process, and act on information. While active matter provides a framework for studying life-like dynamics, it typically omits internal information-processing…
The extension of thermodynamic principles to active matter remains a challenge due to the non-equilibrium nature inherent to active systems. In this study, we introduce a framework to assess entropy in our minimal macroscopic experiment…
Molecular motors work collectively to transport cargo within cells, with anywhere from one to several hundred motors towing a single cargo. For a broad class of collective-transport systems, we use tools from stochastic thermodynamics to…
A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of…