Thermodynamic uncertainty relation for systems with active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles

TL;DR

This paper derives a thermodynamic uncertainty relation for active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles, revealing how active noise modifies thermodynamic costs and impacts the estimation of anomalous diffusion in active systems.

Contribution

It provides the first explicit TUR expression for active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles, incorporating active noise effects and optimizing the TUR bound with a new scaling parameter.

Findings

Active noise modifies thermodynamic cost terms in TUR.

Active noise hampers accurate estimation of anomalous diffusion.

Derived a steady-state TUR for active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck systems.

Abstract

Thermodynamic uncertainty relations (TURs) delineate tradeoff relations between the thermodynamic cost and the magnitude of an observable's fluctuation. While TURs have been established for various nonequilibrium systems, their applicability to systems influenced by active noise remains largely unexplored. Here, we present an explicit expression of TUR for systems with active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles (AOUPs). Our findings reveal that active noise introduces modifications to the terms associated with the thermodynamic cost in the TUR expression. The altered thermodynamic cost encompasses not only the conventional entropy production but also the energy consumption induced by the active noise. We examine the capability of this TUR as an accurate estimator of the extent of anomalous diffusion in systems with active noise driven by a constant force in free space. By introducing the concept of a contracted probability density function, we derive a steady-state TUR tailored to this system. Moreover, through the adoption of a new scaling parameter, we enhance and optimize the TUR bound further. Our results demonstrate that active noise tends to hinder accurate estimation of the anomalous diffusion extent. Our study offers a systematic approach for exploring the fluctuation nature of biological systems operating in active environments.