Frenetic bounds on the entropy production

Christian Maes

Published 2017-05-21Version 1

Fluctuations and response of nonequilibrium systems show both entropic and frenetic aspects. Under local detailed balance the expected entropy production rate can always be bounded in terms of the expected dynamical activity given the current system condition. The activity or frenetic contribution refers to the time-symmetric contribution in the action functional for path-space probabilities. Under global detailed balance we get a lower bound on the decrease of free energy which is known from gradient flow analysis. For stationary driven systems we recover some of the recently studied "uncertainty" relations for the entropy production, appearing in studies about the effectiveness of mesoscopic machines. We extend these lower bounds for the entropy production rate to include underdamped diffusions.