Creation, dissipation and recycling of resources in non-equilibrium systems (Q1871958)

The authors define stochastic dynamics for a system coupled to reservoirs. They compare the variation of information and of entropy. The Carnot dissipation is introduced, and calculated explicitly using the cycles of transitions in the system. This generalizes the calclation of Hill to any system. Moreover they consider the effect of switching off certain reservoirs and the initial relaxation towards a new stationary state. Finally the authors study the near degeneracy of the stochastic matrix, relate it to phase transitions and show that the reduced dynamics on the set of phases is a permutation.