Thermodynamic speed limits for mechanical work

Abstract

Thermodynamic speed limits are a set of classical uncertainty relations that, so far, place global bounds on the stochastic dissipation of energy as heat and the production of entropy. Here, instead of constraints on these thermodynamic costs, we derive integral speed limits that are upper and lower bounds on a thermodynamic benefit -- the minimum time for an amount of mechanical work to be done on or by a system. In the short time limit, we show how this extrinsic timescale relates to an intrinsic timescale for work, recovering the intrinsic timescales in differential speed limits from these integral speed limits and turning the first law of stochastic thermodynamics into a first law of speeds. As physical examples, we consider the work done by a flashing Brownian ratchet and the work done on a particle in a potential well subject to external driving.

Main text = 5.5 pages (including references), supplemental information = 1 page

References in corpus (4)

• Thermodynamic uncertainty relation for biomolecular processes
• Ensemble and Trajectory Thermodynamics: A Brief Introduction
• Thermodynamic interpretation of Wasserstein distance
• Non-equilibrium work distribution for interacting colloidal particles under friction

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• Generalized Entropic Quantum Speed Limits
• Tighter Lower Bounds on Quantum Annealing Times
• Quantum speed limits based on Jensen-Shannon and Jeffreys divergences for general physical processes
• Thermodynamic speed limit for non-adiabatic work and its classical-quantum decomposition