Entropy production of resetting processes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermodynamic entropy production in stochastic resetting processes where the reset position is random, deriving general formulas and analyzing large-deviation behaviors for specific resetting distributions.

Contribution

It provides a general expression for average entropy production in resetting systems with arbitrary potentials and characterizes the full distribution for free particles, revealing anomalous scaling and phase transitions.

Findings

Derived a general formula for average entropy production.

Analyzed the full distribution of entropy production for free particles.

Discovered anomalous large-deviation scaling and a condensation transition.

Abstract

Stochastic systems that undergo random restarts to their initial state have been widely investigated in recent years, both theoretically and in experiments. Oftentimes, however, resetting to a fixed state is impossible due to thermal noise or other limitations. As a result, the system configuration after a resetting event is random. Here, we consider such a resetting protocol for an overdamped Brownian particle in a confining potential $V(x)$. We assume that the position of the particle is reset at a constant rate to a random location $x$, drawn from a distribution $p_R(x)$. To investigate the thermodynamic cost of resetting, we study the stochastic entropy production $S_{\rm Total}$. We derive a general expression for the average entropy production for any $V(x)$, and the full distribution $P(S_{\rm Total}|t)$ of the entropy production for $V(x)=0$. At late times, we show that this distribution assumes the large-deviation form $P(S_{\rm Total}|t)\sim \exp\left[-t^{2\alpha-1}\phi\left(\left(S_{\rm Total}-\langle S_{\rm Total}\rangle\right)/t^{\alpha}\right)\right]$, with $1/2<\alpha\leq 1$. We compute the rate function $\phi(z)$ and the exponent $\alpha$ for exponential and Gaussian resetting distributions. In the latter case, we find the anomalous exponent $\alpha=2/3$ and show that $\phi(z)$ has a first-order singularity at a critical value of $z$, corresponding to a real-space condensation transition.