Inferring entropy production in anharmonic Brownian gyrators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a short-time inference scheme effectively quantifies entropy production in anharmonic Brownian gyrators, revealing significant differences from harmonic models and advancing non-equilibrium thermodynamics analysis.

Contribution

The study applies a recent inference scheme to anharmonic Brownian gyrators, showing its effectiveness in complex non-linear systems and uncovering new non-equilibrium behaviors.

Findings

Efficient entropy production estimation from moderate trajectory data.

Anharmonic potentials lead to distinct non-equilibrium properties.

Differences between harmonic and anharmonic gyrator dynamics are significant.

Abstract

A non-vanishing entropy production rate is one of the defining characteristics of any non-equilibrium system, and several techniques exist to determine this quantity directly from experimental data. The short-time inference scheme, derived from the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, is a recent addition to the list of these techniques. Here we apply this scheme to quantify the entropy production rate in a class of microscopic heat engine models called Brownian gyrators. In particular, we consider models with anharmonic confining potentials. In these cases, the dynamical equations are indelibly non-linear, and the exact dependences of the entropy production rate on the model parameters are unknown. Our results demonstrate that the short-time inference scheme can efficiently determine these dependencies from a moderate amount of trajectory data. Furthermore, the results show that the non-equilibrium properties of the gyrator model with anharmonic confining potentials are considerably different from its harmonic counterpart - especially in set-ups leading to a non-equilibrium dynamics and the resulting gyration patterns.