Frenetic bounds on the entropy production

Abstract

We show that under local detailed balance the expected entropy production rate is always bounded in terms of the dynamical activity. The activity refers to the time-symmetric contribution in the action functional for path-space probabilities and relates to escape rates and unoriented traffic. Under global detailed balance we get a lower bound on the decrease of free energy which is known from gradient flow analysis. For stationary driven systems we recover some of the recently studied "uncertainty" relations for the entropy production, appearing in studies about the effectiveness of mesoscopic machines and that refine the positivity of the entropy production rate by providing lower bounds in terms of a positive and even function of the current(s). We extend these lower bounds for the entropy production rate to include underdamped diffusions.