Unified, Geometric Framework for Nonequilibrium Protocol Optimization

• Published in: Physical review letters Vol. 130; no. 10; p. 107101
• Main Authors: Chennakesavalu, Shriram, Rotskoff, Grant M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 10.03.2023
• ISSN: 1079-7114
• DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.130.107101

Controlling thermodynamic cycles to minimize the dissipated heat is a long-standing goal in thermodynamics, and more recently, a central challenge in stochastic thermodynamics for nanoscale systems. Here, we introduce a theoretical and computational framework for optimizing nonequilibrium control protocols that can transform a system between two distributions in a minimally dissipative fashion. These protocols optimally transport a system along paths through the space of probability distributions that minimize the dissipative cost of a transformation. Furthermore, we show that the thermodynamic metric-determined via a linear response approach-can be directly derived from the same objective function that is optimized in the optimal transport problem, thus providing a unified perspective on thermodynamic geometries. We investigate this unified geometric framework in two model systems and observe that our procedure for optimizing control protocols is robust beyond linear response.