Entropy production of resetting processes

Abstract

Stochastic systems that undergo random restarts to their initial state have been widely investigated in recent years, both theoretically and in experiments. Oftentimes, however, resetting to a fixed state is impossible due to thermal noise or other limitations. As a result, the system configuration after a resetting event is random. Here, we consider such a resetting protocol for an overdamped Brownian particle in a confining potential $V(x)$. We assume that the position of the particle is reset at a constant rate to a random location $x$, drawn from a distribution $p_R(x)$. To investigate the thermodynamic cost of resetting, we study the stochastic entropy production $S_{\mathrm{Total}}$. We derive a general expression for the average entropy production for any $V(x)$, and the full distribution $P(S_{\mathrm{Total}}|t)$ of the entropy production for $V(x)=0$. At late times, we show that this distribution assumes the large-deviation form $P(S_{\mathrm{Total}}|t)\sim \exp \left[-t^{2\alpha -1}\varphi \left(\left(S_{\mathrm{Total}}-⟨S_{\mathrm{Total}}⟩\right)/t^{\alpha }\right)\right]$, with $1/2<\alpha \le 1$. We compute the rate function $\varphi (z)$ and the exponent $\alpha$ for exponential and Gaussian resetting distributions. In the latter case, we find the anomalous exponent $\alpha =2/3$ and show that $\varphi (z)$ has a first-order singularity at a critical value of $z$, corresponding to a real-space condensation transition.

29 pages, 6 figures