DATE2026.06.22 #Press Releases

Breaking Down the Thermodynamic Cost of Sustaining Nonlinear Oscillations

—Koopman Mode Decomposition of Thermodynamic Dissipation in Nonlinear Langevin Systems—

Research Summary

A research team including Daiki Sekizawa, then a graduate student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo; Associate Professor Masafumi Oizumi of the same graduate school; and Associate Professor Sosuke Ito of the Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, has developed a new theoretical framework for analyzing the thermodynamic cost that underlies nonlinear oscillatory phenomena. The framework decomposes the component of this cost that is associated with sustaining oscillations into contributions from individual oscillatory components.

Nonlinear oscillations are widely observed not only in biological systems, but also in physical, chemical, and engineering systems. These oscillations are sustained in the presence of noise, and doing so involves a thermodynamic cost measured by the entropy production rate. In this study, the researchers used Koopman mode decomposition to break down the component of the entropy production rate associated with maintaining the probability distribution — the housekeeping entropy production rate — into contributions from multiple oscillatory components, and quantified the extent to which each component contributes.

These findings are expected to provide a foundation for understanding a wide range of nonlinear oscillatory phenomena from the perspective of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.The findings were published online on 18 June  in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

Oscillatory-mode decomposition of thermodynamic dissipation

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Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo　

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