Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520;
Systems Biology Institute, Yale University, West Haven, CT 06516.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Feb 18;117(7):3478-3483. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1915676117. Epub 2020 Feb 4.
How much free energy is irreversibly lost during a thermodynamic process? For deterministic protocols, lower bounds on energy dissipation arise from the thermodynamic friction associated with pushing a system out of equilibrium in finite time. Recent work has also bounded the cost of precisely moving a single degree of freedom. Using stochastic thermodynamics, we compute the total energy cost of an autonomously controlled system by considering both thermodynamic friction and the entropic cost of precisely directing a single control parameter. Our result suggests a challenge to the usual understanding of the adiabatic limit: Here, even infinitely slow protocols are energetically irreversible.
在热力学过程中会不可逆地损失多少自由能？对于确定性协议，与在有限时间内推动系统离开平衡相关的热力学摩擦力会导致能量耗散的下界。最近的工作还限制了精确移动单个自由度的代价。我们通过同时考虑热力学摩擦力和精确控制单个控制参数的熵成本，使用随机热力学来计算自主控制系统的总能量成本。我们的结果对通常的绝热极限理解提出了挑战：在这里，即使是无限缓慢的协议在能量上也是不可逆的。
