Recently, there has been dramatic progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, with diverse applications in biological and chemical systems. The central quantity of interest in the field is “entropy production” (EP), which reflects the increase of the entropy of a system and its environment. Major questions of interest include (1) quantitative tradeoffs between EP and performance measures like speed and precision, (2) inference of EP from data, and (3) decomposition of EP into contributions from different sources of dissipation. In this work, we study the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes by considering the information geometry of fluxes. Our approach can be seen as a dynamical generalization of existing work on the information geometry of probability distributions considered at a given instant in time. It is applicable to a broad range of nonequilibrium processes, including nonlinear ones that exhibit oscillations and/or chaos, and it has implications for thermodynamic tradeoffs, thermodynamic inference, and decompositions of EP. As one application, we derive a universal decomposition of EP into “excess” and “housekeeping” contributions, representing contributions from nonstationarity and cyclic fluxes respectively.

Joint work with Andreas Dechant, Kohei Yoshimura, Sosuke Ito. arXiv:2206.14599