A dissipation bound for thermodynamic control

TL;DR

This paper establishes a fundamental lower bound on entropy production for entropically driven thermodynamic systems, showing that dissipation cannot be arbitrarily reduced by slowing protocols, unlike idealized reversible systems.

Contribution

It introduces a dissipation bound for fully realizable, entropically driven systems, linking entropy production to Fisher information and showing limits of reversibility.

Findings

Entropy production exceeds generalized displacement in thermodynamic space.

Slowing the protocol does not reduce dissipation below the bound.

The bound is related to Fisher information metric and is sub-extensive.

Abstract

Biological and engineered systems operate by coupling function to the transfer of heat and/or particles down a thermal or chemical gradient. In idealized \textit{deterministically} driven systems, thermodynamic control can be exerted reversibly, with no entropy production, as long as the rate of the protocol is made slow compared to the equilibration time of the system. Here we consider \textit{fully realizable, entropically driven} systems where the control parameters themselves obey rules that are reversible and that acquire directionality in time solely through dissipation. We show that when such a system moves in a directed way through thermodynamic space, it must produce entropy that is on average larger than its generalized displacement as measured by the Fisher information metric. This distance measure is sub-extensive but cannot be made small by slowing the rate of the protocol.