Near-optimal protocols in complex nonequilibrium transformations

作者：Gingrich Todd R^*; Rotskoff Grant M; Crooks Gavin E; Geissler Phillip L

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016, 113(37): 10263-10268.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.1606273113

• nonequilibrium
• irreversible thermodynamics
• entropic sampling methods
• Metropolis algorithm
• Ising model

The development of sophisticated experimental means to control nanoscale systems has motivated efforts to design driving protocols that minimize the energy dissipated to the environment. Computational models are a crucial tool in this practical challenge. We describe a general method for sampling an ensemble of finite-time, nonequilibrium protocols biased toward a low average dissipation. We show that this scheme can be carried out very efficiently in several limiting cases. As an application, we sample the ensemble of low-dissipation protocols that invert the magnetization of a 2D Ising model and explore how the diversity of the protocols varies in response to constraints on the average dissipation. In this example, we find that there is a large set of protocols with average dissipation close to the optimal value, which we argue is a general phenomenon.

• 出版日期2016-9-13