Milestoning estimators of dissipation in systems observed at a coarse resolution

6Citations
Citations of this article
10Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.
Get full text

Abstract

Many nonequilibrium, active processes are observed at a coarse-grained level, where different microscopic configurations are projected onto the same observable state. Such “lumped” observables display memory, and in many cases, the irreversible character of the underlying microscopic dynamics becomes blurred, e.g., when the projection hides dissipative cycles. As a result, the observations appear less irreversible, and it is very challenging to infer the degree of broken time-reversal symmetry. Here we show, contrary to intuition, that by ignoring parts of the already coarse-grained state space we may—via a process called milestoning—improve entropy-production estimates. We present diverse examples where milestoning systematically renders observations “closer to underlying microscopic dynamics” and thereby improves thermodynamic inference from lumped data assuming a given range of memory, and we hypothesize that this effect is quite general. Moreover, whereas the correct general physical definition of time reversal in the presence of memory remains unknown, we here show by means of physically relevant examples that at least for semi-Markov processes of first and second order, waiting-time contributions arising from adopting a naive Markovian definition of time reversal generally must be discarded.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Blom, K., Song, K., Vouga, E., Godec, A., & Makarov, D. E. (2024). Milestoning estimators of dissipation in systems observed at a coarse resolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(17). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2318333121

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free