Related papers: Self-Organised Optimality in Driven Systems with S…
Despite broad interest in self-organizing systems, there are few quantitative, experimentally-applicable criteria for self-organization. The existing criteria all give counter-intuitive results for important cases. In this Letter, we…
The nature of the behaviour of an isolated many-body quantum system periodically driven in time has been an open question since the beginning of quantum mechanics. After an initial transient, such a system is known to synchronize with the…
By generalizing a class of models recently introduced to account for protracted transients in biological systems, we identify a novel mechanism for hyperuniformity. In this model, competition of particles over a shared resource guides the…
The world is full of systems of distributed agents, collaborating and competing in complex ways: firms and workers specialise within economies, neurons adapt their tuning across brain circuits, and species compete and coexist within…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
The optimization of the conversion of thermal energy into work and the minimization of dissipation for nano- and mesoscopic systems is a complex challenge because of the important role fluctuations play on the dynamics of small systems. We…
Collective behaviours are frequently observed to self-organise to criticality. Existing proposals to explain these phenomena are fragmented across disciplines and only partially answer the question. This primer compares the underlying,…
In this paper we study a class of physical systems that combine a finite number of mechanical and thermodynamic observables. We call them finite dimensional thermo-mechanical systems. We introduce these systems by means of simple examples.…
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…
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
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…
We consider the entropy production of a strongly coupled bipartite system. The total entropy production can be partitioned into various components, which we use to define local versions of the Second Law that are valid without the usual…
Self-organization is a process where order of a whole system arises out of local interactions between small components of a system. Emergy, spelled with an 'm', defined as the amount of (solar) energy used to make a product or service, is…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
We show that the naive application of the maximum entropy principle can yield answers which depend on the level of description, i.e. the result is not invariant under coarse-graining. We demonstrate that the correct approach, even for…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
This paper proposes a variational approach to describe the evolution of organization of complex systems from first principles, as increased efficiency of physical action. Most simply stated, physical action is the product of the energy and…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…