Thermodynamics of Open Chemical Reaction Networks: Theory and applications

Professor Massimiliano Esposito is a theoretical physicist specializing in statistical physics and the study of complex systems. His current research focuses on energy and information processing in small quantum systems and biological systems, in particular chemical reaction networks. He obtained his PhD in 2004 at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium. After two postdocs in California at UC Irvine and UC San Diego, he came back as a contract researcher for two years at ULB. In 2012, he was awarded a five-year Attract Fellowship by the National Research Fund of Luxembourg to start his own research group "Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics" in the Physics and Materials Science Research Unit at the University of Luxembourg.

In 2016, he became Professor of Theoretical Physics and was awarded a five-year Consolidator Grant (NanoThermo) by the European Research Council.

Abstract

After formulating a nonequilibrium thermodynamics for open chemical reaction networks, the theory will be applied to assess the thermodynamics performance of a dissipative self-assembly scheme. Power-efficiency and noise-dissipation trade-offs will be discussed.

References

R. Rao and M. Esposito, "Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Chemical Reaction Networks: Wisdom from Stochastic Thermodynamics", Phys. Rev. X 6, 041064 (2016)

G. Falasco, R. Rao, M. Esposito, "Information Thermodynamics of Turing Patterns", Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 108301 (2018)

E. Penocchio, R. Rao and M. Esposito, Thermodynamic Efficiency in Dissipative Chemistry, Nature Communications 10, 3865 (2019)

G. Falasco, T. Cossetto, E. Penocchio and M. Esposito, "Negative differential response in chemical reactions", New J. Phys. 21, 073005 (2019)