Free-Energy Transduction Within Autonomous Systems

The excess work required to drive a stochastic system out of thermodynamic equilibrium through a time-dependent external perturbation is directly related to the amount of entropy produced during the driving process, allowing excess work and entropy production to be used interchangeably to quantify dissipation. Given the common intuition of biological molecular machines as internally communicating work between components, it is tempting to extend this correspondence to the driving of one component of an autonomous system by another; however, no such relation between the internal excess work and entropy production exists. Here we introduce the "transduced additional free-energy rate" between strongly coupled subsystems of an autonomous system, which is analogous to the excess power in systems driven by an external control parameter that receives no feedback from the system. We prove that this is a relevant measure of dissipation-in that it equals the steady-state entropy production rate due to the downstream subsystem-and demonstrate its advantages with a simple model system.