Entropy production in non-reciprocal polar active mixtures

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the entropy production rate in non-reciprocal polar active mixtures reflects collective behaviors and phase transitions, especially near exceptional points, linking microscopic entropy measures to macroscopic susceptibilities.

Contribution

It demonstrates that entropy production rate peaks at critical exceptional points and correlates with polarization susceptibilities, providing a particle-level understanding of non-equilibrium transitions.

Findings

Entropy production increases with non-reciprocity in chiral states.

Pronounced peaks in entropy production occur at exceptional points.

Entropy production scales with polarization susceptibilities in the long-wavelength limit.

Abstract

The out-of-equilibrium character of active systems is often twofold, arising from both the activity itself and from non-reciprocal couplings between constituents. A well-established measure to quantify the system's distance from equilibrium is the informatic entropy production rate. Here, we ask the question whether and how the informatic entropy production rate reflects collective behaviors and transitions in an active mixture with non-reciprocal polar couplings. In such systems, non-reciprocal orientational couplings can induce chiral motion of particles. At the field-theoretical level, transitions to these time-dependent chiral states are marked by so-called critical exceptional points. Here, we show that at a particle level, the entropy production rate within the chiral states increases with the degree of non-reciprocity, provided it is sufficiently strong. Moreover, even at small degrees of non-reciprocity, the transitions via exceptional points leave clear signatures in the entropy production rate, which exhibits pronounced peaks at coupling strengths corresponding to the field-theoretical exceptional points. Overall, the increase and peaks of the entropy production rate mirror the susceptibility of the polarization vector at the particle level. This correspondence is supported by a field-theoretical analysis, which reveals that, in the long-wavelength limit, the entropy production rate scales with the susceptibilities of the polarization fields.