Minimal work protocols for inertial particles in non-harmonic traps

Abstract

Progress in miniaturized technology allows us to control physical systems at nanoscale with remarkable precision. Experimental advancements have sparked interest in control problems in stochastic thermodynamics, typically concerning a time-dependent potential applied to a nanoparticle to reach a target stationary state in a given time with minimal energy cost. We study this problem for a particle subject to thermal fluctuations in a regime that takes into account the effects of inertia, and, building on the results of a previous work, provide a numerical method to find optimal controls even for non-Gaussian initial and final conditions, corresponding to non-harmonic confinements. The control protocol and the time-dependent position distribution are qualitatively different from the corresponding overdamped limit: in particular, a symmetry of the boundary conditions, which is preserved in the absence of inertia, turns out to be broken in the underdamped regime. We also show that the momentum mean tends to a constant value along the trajectory, except close to the boundary, while the evolution of the position mean and of the second moments is highly non-trivial. Our results also support that the lower bound on the optimal entropy production computed from the overdamped case is tight in the adiabatic limit.