Thermodynamics with Continuous Information Flow

By Jordan M. Horowitz, Massimiliano Esposito. 2014

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide a unified thermodynamic formalism describing information transfers in autonomous as well as nonautonomous systems described by stochastic thermodynamics. We demonstrate how information is continuously generated in an auxiliary system and then transferred to a relevant system that can utilize it to fuel otherwise impossible processes. Indeed, while the joint system satisfies the second law, the entropy balance for the relevant system is modified by an information term related to the mutual information rate between the two systems. We show that many important results previously derived for nonautonomous Maxwell demons can be recovered from our formalism and use a cycle decomposition to analyze the continuous information flow in autonomous systems operating at steady-state. A model system is used to illustrate our findings.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/419cd59c3aeea166841889cd1d93f671765d4574

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Nonequilibrium physics in biology (2019, background): “tic, which can be characterized by probabilistic evolution (Barato et al., 2013; Barato and Seifert, 2014; Hartich et al., 2014; Horowitz and Esposito, 2014).”
Stochastic Time Evolution, Information Geometry, and the Cramér-Rao Bound (2018, background): “Thus, it is not surprising that there exists a strong connection between thermodynamics and information theory, which, despite dating back all the way to Gibbs and Boltzmann [6], has recently received much attention [7–16].”
Thermodynamic Unification of Optimal Transport: Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation, Minimum Dissipation, and Thermodynamic Speed Limits (2022, background): “Although not explicitly stated in this study, our framework is also applicable to bipartite systems [158], in which two subsystems exchange information.”
Fundamental Limits to Cellular Sensing (2015, background): “We are now beginning to understand how in these systems information transmission depends on the lifetime of the readout molecules and on the topology of the readout network [4,23,24,79], and what the trade-off between energy dissipation and information processing is [5,6,44,67].”
Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions (2016, background): “[157] and therefore gives it an alternative interpretation in terms of the flow of mutual information.”
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics in the strong coupling and non-Markovian regime based on a reaction coordinate mapping (2016, background): “Third and finally, we point out that there has been progress to understand the energetics of arbitrary multipartite systems locally [82, 83] and for special situations this is also possible for the entropic balances [84, 85] (note that the meaning of “bipartite” in Refs.”