Lewis-Sigler Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA and Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2015 Dec 31;115(26):260603. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.260603. Epub 2015 Dec 30.
Biological and engineered systems operate by coupling function to the transfer of heat and/or particles down a thermal or chemical gradient. In idealized deterministically driven systems, thermodynamic control can be exerted reversibly, with no entropy production, as long as the rate of the protocol is made slow compared to the equilibration time of the system. Here we consider fully realizable, entropically driven systems where the control parameters themselves obey rules that are reversible and that acquire directionality in time solely through dissipation. We show that when such a system moves in a directed way through thermodynamic space, it must produce entropy that is on average larger than its generalized displacement as measured by the Fisher information metric. This distance measure is subextensive but cannot be made small by slowing the rate of the protocol.
生物和工程系统通过将功能与热或粒子沿着热或化学梯度的传递耦合来运行。在理想化的确定性驱动系统中，只要协议的速率与系统的平衡时间相比足够慢，就可以进行热力学控制，并且不会产生熵。在这里，我们考虑完全可实现的、熵驱动的系统，其中控制参数本身遵循的规则是可逆的，并且仅通过耗散来获得时间上的方向性。我们表明，当这样的系统在热力学空间中定向移动时，它必须产生的熵平均大于其广义位移，这种位移由 Fisher 信息度量来测量。这个距离度量是次扩展性的，但不能通过降低协议的速率来使其变小。
