Moments of Entropy Production in Dissipative Devices

Abstract

We characterize the possible moments of entropy production for general overdamped Markovian systems. We find a general formulation of the problem, and derive a new necessary condition between the second and third moment. We determine all possible first, second and third moments of entropy production for a white noise process. As a consequence, we obtain a lower bound for the skewness of the current fluctuations in dissipative devices such as transistors, thereby demonstrating that the Gaussianity assumption widely used in electronic engineering is thermodynamically inconsistent.