Speaker: Dr. Artemy Kolchinsky (Tokyo Univ.)

Date: June 13th (Mon.) 17:00- 

Title: Thermodynamics under Protocol Constraints

Abstract: 

In many real-world situations, there are constraints on the ways in which a physical system can be manipulated, which can have important effects on thermodynamic costs. We investigate the entropy production (EP) and extractable work involved in carrying out a physical process, given that the set of master equations available to the driving protocol obeys some constraints. We derive general bounds on EP and extractable work in the presence of constraints, as well as a decomposition of the nonequilibrium free energy into an “accessible free energy” (which can be extracted as work) and an “inaccessible free energy” (which must be dissipated as EP). In a similar vein, we consider the thermodynamics of information, and show that the information acquired in a measurement can be decomposed into “accessible” and “inaccessible” components. This decomposition allows us to consider the thermodynamic efficiency of different measurements of the same system. We use our framework to analyze protocols subject to symmetry, modularity, and coarse-grained constraints and to consider various examples including the Szilard box and the 2D Ising model. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.041024