The maximum energy dissipation principle and phenomenological cooperative and collective effects

TL;DR

This paper employs the maximum energy dissipation principle within a variational framework to compare cooperative phenomena in physics and biology/chemistry, highlighting differences from traditional free energy methods.

Contribution

It introduces a variational approach based on optimal control to describe cooperative phenomena in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, contrasting it with the Landau free energy method.

Findings

The approach effectively models non-equilibrium cooperative phenomena.

Differences between thermodynamic and kinetic descriptions are elucidated.

The variational method offers a new perspective on collective effects.

Abstract

The collective phenomena in physics and cooperative phenomena in biology/chemistry is compared in terms of the variational description. The maximum energy dissipation principle is employed and the cost-like functional is chosen according to an optimal control based formulation (Moroz, 2008; Moroz, 2009). Using this approach, the variational outline has been considered for non-equilibrium thermodynamic conditions. The differences between the application of the proposed approach to the description of cooperative phenomena in chemical/biochemical kinetics and the Landau free energy approach to collective phenomena in physics have been investigated.