Thermodynamic metrics and optimal paths.

By David A. Sivak, Gavin E. Crooks. 2012

309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A fundamental problem in modern thermodynamics is how a molecular-scale machine performs useful work, while operating away from thermal equilibrium without excessive dissipation. To this end, we derive a friction tensor that induces a Riemannian manifold on the space of thermodynamic states. Within the linear-response regime, this metric structure controls the dissipation of finite-time transformations, and bestows optimal protocols with many useful properties. We discuss the connection to the existing thermodynamic length formalism, and demonstrate the utility of this metric by solving for optimal control parameter protocols in a simple nonequilibrium model.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, 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.”
Quantum thermodynamics (2015, background): “ETH was numerically verified for hardcore bosons in [133] and we refer the interested reader to a review of the field in [25], see [134,135] for a geometric approach to the discussion of thermodynamics and thermalisation.”