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Control of active field theories at minimal dissipation

Artur Soriani,E. Tjhung,'Etienne Fodor,Tomer Markovich

Published 2025 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

Advances in experimental techniques enable the precise manipulation of a large variety of active systems, which constantly dissipate energy to sustain nonequilibrium phenomena without any equilibrium equivalent. To design novel materials out of active systems, an outstanding challenge is to rationalize how material properties can be optimally controlled by applying external perturbations. However, equilibrium thermodynamics is inadequate to guide the control of such nonequilibrium systems. Therefore, there is a dire need for a novel framework to provide a systematic toolbox for the thermodynamic control of active matter. Here, we build an optimization procedure for generic active field theories within a thermodynamically consistent formulation. Central to our approach is the distinction between the protocol heat, which is dissipated only during manipulation, and the total heat, which also accounts for the post-manipulation dissipation. We demonstrate that the latter generically features a global minimum with respect to the protocol duration. We deploy our versatile approach to an active theory of phase separation, and examine the scalings of the optimal protocol duration with respect to activity and system size. Remarkably, we reveal that the landscape of steady-state dissipation regulates the crossover between optimal control strategies for a finite duration.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2025

  • Venue

    Unknown venue

  • Publication date

    2025-04-27

  • Fields of study

    Materials Science, Physics

  • Identifiers
    arXiv 2504.19285
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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