Coarse-grained entropy production with multiple reservoirs: unraveling the role of time-scales and detailed balance in biology-inspired systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework to analyze entropy production in systems with multiple interacting processes and different time-scales, highlighting the impact of non-equilibrating processes on system efficiency.

Contribution

It develops a general theoretical approach to calculate entropy production considering the interplay of multiple processes and their relaxation behaviors, extending existing models.

Findings

Explicit formulas for entropy production with multiple couplings

Identification of finite corrections due to non-equilibrating processes

Application to simple systems illustrating the framework's implications

Abstract

A general framework to describe a vast majority of biology-inspired systems is to model them as stochastic processes in which multiple couplings are in play at the same time. Molecular motors, chemical reaction networks, catalytic enzymes, and particles exchanging heat with different baths, constitute some interesting examples of such a modelization. Moreover, they usually operate out of equilibrium, being characterized by a net production of entropy, which entails a constrained efficiency. Hitherto, in order to investigate multiple processes simultaneously driving a system, all theoretical approaches deal with them independently, at a coarse-grained level, or employing a separation of time-scales. Here, we explicitly take in consideration the interplay among time-scales of different processes, and whether or not their own evolution eventually relaxes toward an equilibrium state in a given sub-space. We propose a general framework for multiple coupling, from which the well-known formulas for the entropy production can be derived, depending on the available information about each single process. Furthermore, when one of the processes does not equilibrate in its sub-space, even if much faster than all the others, it introduces a finite correction to the entropy production. We employ our framework in various simple and pedagogical examples, for which such a corrective term can be related to a typical scaling of physical quantities in play.