Understand
Anisotropy in temperature, chemical potential, or ion concentration, provides the fuel that feeds dynamical processes that sustain life.
- At the same time, anisotropy is a root cause of incurred losses manifested as entropy production.
- In this work we consider a rudimentary model of an overdamped stochastic thermodynamic system in an anisotropic temperature heat bath, and study minimum entropy production when driving the system between thermodynamic states in finite time.
- While entropy production in isotropic temperature environments can be expressed in terms of the length (in the Wasserstein-2 metric) traversed by the thermodynamic state of the system, anisotropy complicates substantially the mechanism of entropy production since, besides dissipation, seepage of energy between ambient anisotropic heat sources by way of the system dynamics is often a major contributing factor.