Fig. 2: Experimental evolution of the generalized excess free energy during heating and cooling under TE conditions.
From: Heating and cooling are fundamentally asymmetric and evolve along distinct pathways
Thick red arrows stand for heating, whereas thin blue arrows represent cooling. a,b, Time evolution of the generalized excess free energy for a characteristic time τ = γ/κ = 0.1844(3) ms, Tc/Tw = 0.11(1) and Th/Tw = 3.56(1) for the forward protocol (a) and the backward protocol (b). Red circles stand for heating and blue squares stand for cooling. Solid lines correspond to the theoretical predictions without fitting parameters. Insets represent the initial value of the relative entropy \({\mathcal{D}}_{i}^\mathrm{w}(0)/{k}_\mathrm{B}{T}_\mathrm{w}\) (y axis) as a function of the temperature (x axis) on the logarithmic scale. The arrows represent the evolution direction along the master curve \(f(\rho )=(\rho -1-\ln \rho )/2\). The data are estimated as the mean over ten independent measurements, whereas error bars are the s.e.m. (see Methods for further details). c,d, Generalized excess free energy \({\mathcal{D}}_{i/\mathrm{w}}^{\mathrm{w}/i}(t)/{k}_\mathrm{B}{T}_\mathrm{w}\) as a function of \({\varLambda }_{i/\mathrm{w}}^{\mathrm{w}/i}(t)\), along the master curve f(ρ), for several different TE conditions for the forward protocol (c) and the backward protocol (d). The corresponding time series (data and error bars) are included in Extended Data Fig. 3. Here, error bars have been omitted for clarity.
