Stochastic entropy production arising from nonstationary thermal transport

TL;DR

This paper investigates the statistical properties of stochastic entropy production during nonstationary heat transport in a system coupled to a time-dependent heat bath, combining numerical and analytical approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of entropy production components in nonstationary thermal transport, including new analytic expressions and fluctuation relation insights.

Findings

Total entropy production and relaxational part satisfy fluctuation relations.

All three entropy production components are crucial for accurate description.

Analytic and numerical methods agree on key statistical properties.

Abstract

We compute statistical properties of the stochastic entropy production associated with the nonstationary transport of heat through a system coupled to a time dependent nonisothermal heat bath. We study the 1-d stochastic evolution of a bound particle in such an environment by solving the appropriate Langevin equation numerically, and by using an approximate analytic solution to the Kramers equation to determine the behaviour of an ensemble of systems. We express the total stochastic entropy production in terms of a relaxational or nonadiabatic part together with two components of housekeeping entropy production and determine the distributions for each, demonstrating the importance of all three contributions for this system. We compare the results with an approximate analytic model of the mean behaviour and we further demonstrate that the total entropy production and the relaxational component approximately satisfy detailed fluctuation relations for certain time intervals. Finally, we comment on the resemblance between the procedure for solving the Kramers equation and a constrained extremisation, with respect to the probability density function, of the spatial density of the mean rate of production of stochastic entropy.