Parity Selection Rule for Information and Dissipation in Driven Steady States

Abstract

Tight equalities between symmetric information and entropy production in driven steady states remain elusive. We show that they are forbidden by a parity selection rule for rotation-driven linear nonequilibrium steady states. Whenever the relaxation and diffusion matrices commute, the snapshot mutual information between two time slices is exactly even under drive reversal, and parity violation rises linearly in the commutator norm when alignment is broken. Full isotropy strengthens this to drive-independence, and the planar mutual information takes the closed-form value of about 0.145 nats. Under the same alignment, the entropy production is exactly quadratic in the drive, and its prefactor admits an explicit closed form in the traces and determinant of the two matrices. The orthogonality of even and odd sectors leaves only one-sided thermodynamic-uncertainty bounds. The rule rests on the rotational symmetry of the drift alone and survives heavy-tailed isotropic stable noise with tail index below two, where variance-based bounds become vacuous. A falsifiable test is proposed on an electrical Brownian gyrator augmented for independent drive control with circuit-level stable-noise injection.