Fluctuations When Driving Between Nonequilibrium Steady States

Abstract

Maintained by environmental fluxes, biological systems are thermodynamic processes that operate far from equilibrium without detailed-balance dynamics. Yet, they often exhibit well defined nonequilibrium steady states (NESSs). More importantly, critical thermodynamic functionality arises directly from transitions among their NESSs, driven by environmental switching. Here, we identify constraints on excess thermodynamic quantities that ride above the NESS housekeeping background. We do this by extending the Crooks fluctuation theorem to transitions among NESSs, without invoking an unphysical dual dynamics. This and corresponding integral fluctuation theorems determine how much work must be expended when controlling systems maintained far from equilibrium. This generalizes feedback control theory, showing that Maxwellian Demons can leverage mesoscopic-state information to take advantage of the excess energetics in NESS transitions. Altogether, these point to universal thermodynamic laws that are immediately applicable to the accessible degrees of freedom within the effective dynamic at any emergent level of hierarchical organization. By way of illustration, this readily allows analyzing a voltage-gated sodium ion channel whose molecular conformational dynamics play a critical functional role in propagating action potentials in mammalian neuronal membranes.

25 pages, 7 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/ftdness.htm

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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Kibble-Zurek scaling of the irreversible entropy production
• Unified formalism for entropy productions and fluctuation relations
• Harnessing Fluctuations in Thermodynamic Computing via Time-Reversal Symmetries
• A space-time tradeoff for implementing a function with master equation dynamics
• Balancing Error and Dissipation in Computing
• Non-Markovian Momentum Computing: Universal and Efficient
• Refining Landauer's Stack: Balancing Error and Dissipation When Erasing Information
• Homeostatic and Adaptive Energetics: Nonequilibrium Fluctuations Beyond Detailed Balance in Voltage-Gated Ion Channels
• First and Second Laws of Information Processing by Nonequilibrium Dynamical States