In recent years, there has been much discussion about the need to consider the abstract concept of information in small systems such as biomolecules. A typical example is Maxwell's idea called daemon, and according to this idea, the concept of information can be regarded as a thermodynamic resource. On the other hand, how this concept of information is related to and may affect thermodynamic observables has not been deeply considered until now.

This time, Lecturer Sosuke Ito (UBI) and Researcher Andreas Dechant (Kyoto University) succeeded in linking the rate of change of thermodynamic observables with the abstract concept of information such as "Fisher information", by adding the viewpoint of information geometry to the dynamics described by the stochastic process.

They also discovered a new thermodynamic limit on the rate of change of observables and proposed a method to detect hidden degrees of freedom in biological systems. In biological systems that function at a finite thermal cost, this thermodynamic limit may affect the information processing speed, so it is hoped that the results will lead to a better understanding of the thermodynamics of biological systems.

The results of this research were published in the international scientific journal " Physical Review X " on June 15, 2020 (Eastern Summer Time).

See below for more information.

• Universal Biology Institute : http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/UBI/index_e.html
• Ito Lab. : http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/itogroup/lab/
• Article URL : https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.021056