Speaker
Description
A central quantity of interest in the description of non-equilibrium phenomena is their associated entropy production, which quantifies both their intrinsic irreversibility and their practical energetic cost in the form of dissipation. In recent years, an impressive range of methods for estimating entropy production from observed phenomena, such as currents, oscillations, transition time statistics or cross-correlations, has been developed. However, the overwhelming majority of these results implicitly or explicitly rely on the assumption that all relevant degrees of freedom in the system have even parity, that is, they do not change under time-reversal. In this talk, we explore the consequences of dropping this assumption. We show that, without any assumption on parity, non-equilibrium steady-states cannot be distinguished from equilibrium ones in principle. We also derive conditions for entropy production to be invariant under parity selection and argue for non-adiabatic entropy production as a candidate for a “parity-gauge-invariant” entropy production. Finally, we discuss the consequences of our results for non-Markovian dynamics via Markovian embedding.