Optimal finite-time processes in stochastic thermodynamics.

By Tim Schmiedl, U. Seifert. 2007

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For a small system like a colloidal particle or a single biomolecule embedded in a heat bath, the optimal protocol of an external control parameter minimizes the mean work required to drive the system from one given equilibrium state to another in a finite time. In general, this optimal protocol obeys an integro-differential equation. Explicit solutions both for a moving laser trap and a time-dependent strength of such a trap show finite jumps of the optimal protocol to be typical both at the beginning and at the end of the process.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, AI for Physical Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Variational Walkback: Learning a Transition Operator as a Stochastic Recurrent Net (2017, methodology): “For example, physical methods for ﬁnding optimal thermodynamic paths that minimize heat dissipation (Schmiedl and Seifert, 2007; Sivak and Crooks, 2012; Gingrich et al., 2016), could potentially be exploited to tighten lowerbounds in variational inference.”
Thermodynamics of Micro- and Nano-Systems Driven by Periodic Temperature Variations (2015, unknown): “Such discontinuities were shown to be typical for thermodynamically optimized finite-time protocols connecting two equilibrium states [53].”
Stochastic thermodynamics, fluctuation theorems and molecular machines (2012, background): “Overdamped dynamics The generic jumps in the optimal protocol were first found in case studies involving harmonic potentials [255].”
Refined Second Law of Thermodynamics for Fast Random Processes (2012, methodology): “The minimization of the average heat release, studied here, is closely related to the optimization of the average performed work, as was discussed in [48] and [3].”
Irreversibility in Active Matter Systems: Fluctuation Theorem and Mutual Information (2018, methodology): “Such a setup can be readily implemented in experiment with state-of-the-art optical tweezers, and in fact has been used to study various aspects of stochastic thermodynamics and active matter, for instance in [23, 46, 76, 114–116].”
Thermodynamic Unification of Optimal Transport: Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation, Minimum Dissipation, and Thermodynamic Speed Limits (2022, background): “However, minimizing entropy production is also a particularly relevant issue [60, 61] because it is closely related to the energy lost to the environment.”