NEWS

■Speaker: 

David Sivak (Simon Fraser University)

■Date: 

Tuesday, 2 July 2024: 13:00-

■Place: 

Room 413, Science Building No.1, Hongo Campus, the Univ. of Tokyo

■Title: 

Information arbitrage in molecular machines

Abstract: Heat engines and information engines have each historically served as motivating examples for the development of thermodynamics. While these are typically thought of as two separate kinds of machines, recent empirical studies of specific systems have hinted at possible connections. Inspired by molecular machines in the cellular environment, which in many cases have separate components in contact with distinct sources of fluctuations, we study bipartite heat engines and show that they can only produce net output work by acting as information engines. Conversely, information engines can only extract more work than the work consumed to power them if they have access to different sources of fluctuations, i.e., act as heat engines. We illustrate these findings through a close analogy to economic arbitrage, a cyclically controlled 2D ideal gas and inference of information flows in light-harvesting biomolecular machines. Our results suggest design principles for both heat engines and information engines at the nanoscale, and ultimately imply constraints on how free-energy transduction is carried out within molecular machines.