Gavin Crooks, Physicist Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley
A major impediment to a quantitative understanding of molecular-scale machines is that they operate out of thermodynamic equilibrium. However, we have recently shown that within a linear response framework, optimal (minimum dissipation) thermodynamic control is governed by a fiction metric that generates a Riemannian geometry on thermodynamic state space. I'll discuss the Riemannian geometry of the Ising model, a quintessential model of statistical mechanics that described the thermodynamics of ferromagnetic and fluid systems.