Restoring detailed balance in non-Hermitian Markov processes

Abstract

Stochastic processes out-of-equilibrium often involve asymmetric contributions that break de-tailed balance and lead to non-monotonic entropy production, limiting thermodynamic interpretations and inference techniques. Here we use Dyson maps to restore monotonic entropy growth in those processes, allowing the use of standard tools from statistical physics, providing a general and computationally tractable method applicable to a broad class of Markovian systems.