Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 2: Stochastic thermodynamics and information processing

DY 2.5: Talk

Monday, March 20, 2017, 10:45–11:00, HÜL 186

Cost and Precision of Brownian Clocks — •Andre C Barato — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems

Brownian clocks are biomolecular networks that can count time. A paradigmatic example are proteins that go through a cycle thus regulating some oscillatory behaviour in a living system. Typically, such a cycle requires free energy often provided by ATP hydrolysis. We investigate the relation between the precision of such a clock and its thermodynamic costs. For clocks driven by a constant thermodynamic force, a given precision requires a minimal cost that diverges as the uncertainty of the clock vanishes. In marked contrast, we show that a clock driven by a periodic variation of an external protocol can achieve arbitrary precision at arbitrarily low cost. This result constitutes a fundamental difference between processes driven by a fixed thermodynamic force and those driven periodically. As a main technical tool, we map a periodically driven system with a deterministic protocol to one subject to an external protocol that changes in stochastic time intervals, which simplifies calculations significantly.

Reference: [1] A. C. Barato and U. Seifert; Cost and precision of Brownian clocks; accepted in Phys. Rev. X, arXiv:1610.07960 (2016).