The entropy production rate reflects the dissipation of free energy in a nonequilibrium state, and it is necessary for many biological functions. Nevertheless, trivial systems can display large entropy production, and it is yet an open challenge to characterize the out-of-equilibrium states of living systems and their operational meaning. We present a way to decompose the entropy production rate of a system, capturing how much of it is generated from higher-order interactions between its components. Our method combines recent information-geometric decompositions of the entropy production rate with a hierarchical decomposition of forces into k-body stochastic interactions.

Issue Section:
General Conference
This content is only available as a PDF.
© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2023
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Issue Section:
General Conference