Phase Transition in Protocols Minimizing Work Fluctuations.

Phys Rev Lett

Physics of Living Systems Group, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 400 Technology Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

Published: May 2018

AI Article Synopsis

  • The study investigates two mesoscopic systems—a trapped Brownian particle and a quantum dot—to find optimal protocols that balance mean and standard deviation of dissipated work.
  • In the harmonically trapped particle, several protocols manage a smooth trade-off between average work and its fluctuations.
  • In the quantum dot case, the research reveals a first-order phase transition in optimization as the focus shifts from average work to work fluctuation, resulting in distinct protocol behaviors that do not merge over time.

Article Abstract

For two canonical examples of driven mesoscopic systems-a harmonically trapped Brownian particle and a quantum dot-we numerically determine the finite-time protocols that optimize the compromise between the standard deviation and the mean of the dissipated work. In the case of the oscillator, we observe a collection of protocols that smoothly trade off between average work and its fluctuations. However, for the quantum dot, we find that as we shift the weight of our optimization objective from average work to work standard deviation, there is an analog of a first-order phase transition in protocol space: two distinct protocols exchange global optimality with mixed protocols akin to phase coexistence. As a result, the two types of protocols possess qualitatively different properties and remain distinct even in the infinite duration limit: optimal-work-fluctuation protocols never coalesce with the minimal-work protocols, which therefore never become quasistatic.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.180605DOI Listing

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