Directional fidelity of nanoscale motors and particles is limited by the second law of thermodynamics via a universal equality

Zhisong Wang; Ruizheng Hou; Artem Efremov

doi:10.1063/1.4813626

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1308.4545

Directional fidelity of nanoscale motors and particles is limited by the second law of thermodynamics via a universal equality

Zhisong Wang·Ruizheng Hou·Artem Efremov

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Directional motion of nanoscale motors and driven particles in an isothermal environment costs a finite amount of energy despite zero work as decreed by the 2nd law, but quantifying this general limit remains difficult. Here we derive a universal equality linking directional fidelity of an arbitrary nanoscale object to the least possible energy driving it. The fidelity-energy equality depends on the environmental temperature alone; any lower energy would violate the 2nd law in a thought experiment. Real experimental proof for the equality comes from force-induced motion of biological nanomotors by three independent groups for translational as well as rotational motion. Interestingly, the natural self-propelled motion of a biological nanomotor (F1-ATPase) known to have nearly 100% energy efficiency evidently pays the 2nd-law decreed least energy cost for direction production.

Explore related subjects

cond-mat.stat-mech physics.bio-ph

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Zhisong Wang, Ruizheng Hou, Artem Efremov. 2013-08-21. Directional fidelity of nanoscale motors and particles is limited by the second law of thermodynamics via a universal equality. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4813626

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Universal sampling of spin systems across quenched disorder

Statistical physics extracts macroscopic laws by averaging over the many microscopic degrees of freedom of a system. Disordered systems demand a second and far harder average, one over the quenched randomness itself. The classic analytical routes, the replica and cavity methods, become uncontrolled outside mean-field or tree-like limits, and conventional numerical algorithms like parallel tempering require expensive, independent equilibration for every disorder realization. In this work, we introduce a universal neural variational framework that amortizes inference across the disorder ensemble, eliminating both the need for per-instance Markov chain equilibration and the cost of retraining instance-specific variational ansatzes. Built on an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture, after training once, it produces an explicit approximation to the Boltzmann distribution given previously unseen disorder realizations without further optimization. We validate this framework on 2D Edwards-Anderson models, and apply it to the random-bond Ising model, successfully capturing the Binder cumulant crossings near the Nishimori multicritical point. These results shift the object of variational inference from the single instance to the disorder ensemble, opening a route to frustrated many-body systems where instance-by-instance computation is prohibitive.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2026

Information-Theoretic Characterization of Macroscopic Chaos Emerging from the Chemical Master Equation

Open chemical reaction networks exhibit stochastic concentration dynamics at finite system sizes, whereas their macroscopic limit is governed by deterministic rate equations that can display chaos. In this Letter, we show theoretically that a rate of information loss constructed from two-time mutual information recovers the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy in the deterministic limit. We verify this result through numerical simulations of a Markov jump process for a three-species system involving seven reactions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2026

Orientational order on non-orientable domains

We study the statistical properties of passive and active many-body systems with orientational degrees of freedom on non-orientable domains. By rephrasing topological constraints as non-local symmetry relations on an orientable double-cover, we show that non-orientability eliminates global rotational soft modes without acting like an external field. In a passive XY model, this results in topological caging, where orientational fluctuations that exhibit conventional diffusive behavior on a torus saturate on a Klein bottle to a finite value that we compute exactly in the thermodynamic limit. In models of active self-propelled particles with orientational degrees of freedom, topological caging persists despite continuously changing interaction neighborhoods. In an active Ising spin model, non-orientability enforces the coexistence of ordered anti-parallel domains with vanishing global polar order, a state that is absent on orientable domains.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗