Sampling an Ensemble of Low-dissipation Protocols for Nonequilibrium Control

The development of sophisticated experimental tools for controlling nanoscale systems has motivated efforts to design driving protocols which minimize the energy dissipated to the environment. Computational models are a crucial ingredient in this practical challenge and we describe a general method for sampling an ensemble of finite-time, nonequilibrium protocols biased towards a low average dissipation. We show that this scheme can be carried out very efficiently in several limiting cases and analyze the computational efficiency of the algorithm for a simple model system. As an application, we sample the ensemble of low-dissipation protocols that invert the magnetization of the 2D Ising model and explore how the diversity of the protocols varies in response to constraints on the average dissipation.