We consider stationary driven systems in contact with a thermal equilibrium bath. There is a constant (Joule) heat dissipated from the steady system to the environment as long as all parameters are unchanged. As a natural generalization from equilibrium thermodynamics, the nonequilibrium heat capacity measures the excess in that dissipated heat when the temperature of the thermal bath is changed. To improve experimental accessibility we show how the heat capacity can also be obtained from the response of the instantaneous heat flux to small periodic temperature variations.
In small systems where relevant energies are comparable to thermal agitation, fluctuations are of the order of average values. In systems in thermodynamical equilibrium, the variance of these fluctuations can be related to the dissipation constant in the system, exploiting the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem (FDT). In non-equilibrium steady systems, Fluctuations Theorems (FT) additionally describe symmetry properties of the probability density functions (PDFs) of the fluctuations of injected and dissipated energies. We experimentally probe a model system: an electrical dipole driven out of equ…
With a statistical measure of distance, we derive a classical uncertainty relation for processes traversing nonequilibrium states both transiently and irreversibly. The geometric uncertainty associated with dynamical histories that we define is an upper bound for the entropy production and flow rates, but it does not necessarily correlate with the shortest distance to equilibrium. For a model one-bit memory device, we find that expediting the erasure protocol increases the maximum dissipated heat and geometric uncertainty. A driven version of Onsager's three-state model shows that a set of dis…
In a generalized framework for the Landauer erasure protocol, we study bounds on the heat dissipated in typical nonequilibrium quantum processes. In contrast to thermodynamic processes, quantum fluctuations are not suppressed in the nonequilibrium regime and cannot be ignored, making such processes difficult to understand and treat. Here we derive an emergent fluctuation relation that virtually guarantees the average heat produced to be dissipated into the reservoir either when the system or reservoir is large (or both) or when the temperature is high. The implication of our result is that for…
Living organisms are inherently out-of-equilibrium systems. We employ new developments in stochastic energetics and rely on a minimal microscopic model to predict the amount of mechanical energy dissipated by such dynamics. Our model includes complex rheological effects and nonequilibrium stochastic forces. By performing active microrheology and tracking micron-sized vesicles in the cytoplasm of living oocytes, we provide unprecedented measurements of the spectrum of dissipated energy. We show that our model is fully consistent with the experimental data, and we use it to offer predictions for…
In the absence of external driving, a system exposed to thermal fluctuations will relax to equilibrium. However, the constant input of work makes it possible to counteract this relaxation, and maintain the system in a nonequilibrium steady state. In this Article, we use the stochastic thermodynamics of Markov jump processes to compute the minimum rate at which energy must be supplied and dissipated to maintain an arbitrary nonequilibrium distribution in a given energy landscape. This lower bound depends on two factors: the undriven probability current in the equilibrium state, and the distance…
The notion of a nonequilibrium heat capacity is important for bio-energetics and for calorimetry of active materials more generally. It centers around the notion of excess heat or excess work dissipated during a quasistatic relaxation between different nonequilibrium conditions. We give exact results for active random walks moving in an energy landscape on a graph, based on calculations employing the matrix-tree and matrix-forest theorems. That graphical method applies to any Markov jump process under the physical condition of local detailed balance, and is not restricted to the examples given…
Nonequilibrium systems exchange the energy with an environment in the form of work and heat. The work done on a system obeys the fluctuation theorem, while the dissipated heat which differs from the work by the internal energy change does not. We derive the modified fluctuation relation for the heat in the overdamped Langevin system. It shows that mutual correlations among the work, the heat, and the internal energy change are responsible for the different fluctuation property of the work and the heat. The mutual correlation is investigated in detail in a two-dimensional linear diffusion syste…
Using Brownian motion in periodic potentials $V(x)$ tilted by a force $f$, we provide physical insight into the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, a recently conjectured principle for statistical errors and irreversible heat dissipation in nonequilibrium steady states. According to the relation, nonequilibrium output generated from dissipative processes necessarily incurs an energetic cost or heat dissipation $q$, and in order to limit the output fluctuation within a relative uncertainty $ε$, at least $2k_BT/ε^2$ of heat must be dissipated. Our model shows that this bound is attained not only…
We consider the amount of energy dissipated during individual avalanches at the depinning transition of disordered and athermal elastic systems. Analytical progress is possible in the case of the Alessandro-Beatrice-Bertotti-Montorsi (ABBM) model for Barkhausen noise, due to an exact mapping between the energy released in an avalanche and the area below a Brownian path until its first zero-crossing. Scaling arguments and examination of an extended mean-field model with internal structure show that dissipation relates to a critical exponent recently found in a study of the rounding of the depin…
Fluctuation theorems play a central role in nonequilibrium physics and stochastic thermodynamics. Here we derive an integral fluctuation theorem for the dissipated heat in systems governed by an underdamped Langevin dynamics. We show that this identity may be used to predict the occurrence of extreme events leading to exponential tails in the probability distribution functions of the heat and related quantities.
We use Newtonian and overdamped Langevin dynamics to study long flexible polymers dragged by an external force at a constant velocity $v$. The work $W$ by that force depends on the initial state of the polymer and the details of the process. Jarzynski equality can be used to relate the non-equilibrium work distribution $P(W)$ obtained from repeated experiments to equilibrium free energy difference $ΔF$ between the initial and final states. We use the power law dependence of the geometrical and dynamical characteristics of the polymer on the number of monomers $N$ to suggest the existence of a …
The housekeeping heat $Q\hk$ is the dissipated heat necessary to maintain the violation of detailed balance in nonequilibrium steady states. By analyzing the evolution of its probability distribution, we prove an integral fluctuation theorem $\mean{\exp[-βQ\hk]}=1$ valid for arbitrary driven transitions between steady states. We discuss Gaussian limiting cases and the difference between the new theorem and both the Hatano-Sasa and the Jarzynski relation.
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 equivalent. Though active field theories offer a useful hydrodynamic description, it is unclear how to properly quantify the energetic cost of the dynamics from such a coarse-grained description. We provide a thermodynamically consistent framework to identify the energy exchanges between active systems and their surrounding thermostat at the hydrodynamic level. Based …
Theoretical analysis, which maps single molecule time trajectories of a molecular motor onto unicyclic Markov processes, allows us to evaluate the heat dissipated from the motor and to elucidate its dependence on the mean velocity and diffusivity. Unlike passive Brownian particles in equilibrium, the velocity and diffusion constant of molecular motors are closely inter-related to each other. In particular, our study makes it clear that the increase of diffusivity with the heat production is a natural outcome of active particles, which is reminiscent of the recent experimental premise that the …
Complex systems can convert energy imparted by nonequilibrium forces to regulate how quickly they transition between long lived states. While such behavior is ubiquitous in natural and synthetic systems, currently there is no general framework to relate the enhancement of a transition rate to the energy dissipated, or to bound the enhancement achievable for a given energy expenditure. We employ recent advances in statistical thermodynamics to build such a framework, which can be used to gain mechanistic insight on transitions far from equilibrium. We show that under general conditions, there i…
Nonequilibrium steady states are investigated in a coupled cavity QED array system which is pumped by a thermal bath and dissipated through cavity loss. In the coherent (non-zero photon amplitude) phase, plateau regions appear, where the steady states become unchanged against the variation of the chemical potential of the thermal bath. The cavity loss plays a crucial role for the plateaus: the plateaus appear only if the cavity loss exists, and the photon leakage current, which is induced by the loss, is essential to the mechanism of the plateaus.
Experimental simulation of non-equilibrium quantum piston on a programmable photonic quantum computer
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院）；Single Quantum B.V.（Single Quantum有限公司）；RISE Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典RISE研究院）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
