Preprint: Sampling an Ensemble of Low-dissipation Protocols for Nonequilibrium Control
Todd R. Gingrich, Grant M. Rotskoff, Gavin E. Crooks, Phillip L. Geissler arXiv:1602.01459
Abstract
The development of sophisticated experimental tools for controlling nanoscale systems has motivated efforts to design driving protocols which minimize the energy dissipated to the environment. Computational models are a crucial ingredient in this practical challenge and we describe a general method for sampling an ensemble of finite-time, nonequilibrium protocols biased towards a low average dissipation. We show that this scheme can be carried out very efficiently in several limiting cases and analyze the computational efficiency of the algorithm for a simple model system. As an application, we sample the ensemble of low-dissipation protocols that invert the magnetization of the 2D Ising model and explore how the diversity of the protocols varies in response to constraints on the average dissipation.
