1. Minimal-work protocols for inertial particles in non-harmonic traps
- Author
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Sanders, Julia, Baldovin, Marco, and Muratore-Ginanneschi, Paolo
- Subjects
Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics ,Mathematical Physics ,Mathematics - Optimization and Control - Abstract
The progress of miniaturized technology allows controlling physical systems at nanoscale with remarkable precision in regimes where thermal fluctuations are non-negligible. Experimental advancements have sparked interest in control problems in stochastic thermodynamics, typically concerning a time-dependent potential applied to a nanoparticle to reach a target stationary state in a given time with minimal energy cost. We study this problem for a particle subject to thermal fluctuations in a regime that takes into account the effects of inertia, and, building on the results of [1], provide a numerical method to find optimal controls even for non-Gaussian initial and final conditions corresponding to non-harmonic confinements. We show that the momentum mean tends to a constant value along the trajectory except at the boundary and the evolution of the variance is non-trivial. Our results also support that the lower bound on the optimal entropy production computed from the overdamped case is tight in the adiabatic limit., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures
- Published
- 2024