Irreversibility in dynamical phases and transitions

Abstract

Living and non-living active matter consumes energy at the microscopic scale to drive emergent, macroscopic behavior including traveling waves and coherent oscillations. Recent work has characterized non-equilibrium systems by their total energy dissipation, but little has been said about how dissipation manifests in distinct spatiotemporal patterns. We introduce a novel measure of irreversibility we term the entropy production factor (EPF) to quantify how time reversal symmetry is broken in field theories across scales. We use the EPF to characterize a dynamical phase transition in simulations of the Brusselator, a prototypical biochemically motivated non-linear oscillator. The EPF quantifies the distribution of irreversibility across spatiotemporal frequencies as the Brusselator transitions from local to global coherent oscillations, bounding the energetic cost to establish spatially synchronized biochemical oscillations.