Seminar of Dr Jonas Berx

Seminar of Dr Jonas Berx

Jonas BerxPareto-optimal protocols for active particles in moving traps"Optimal control theory is often framed around a single goal, e.g, minimizing the average work or entropy production required to drive a system between steady states. In realistic physical and biological systems, however, improving one performance measure typically comes at a cost: protocols that minimize average work, for instance, often lead to large fluctuations. In this talk, I introduce a framework for Pareto-optimal control that makes these trade-offs explicit. As a concrete example, I study an active particle dragged through a fluid by a time-dependent harmonic trap, where the two competing objectives are the mean work and its fluctuations. I show that this problem can be solved analytically, yielding a family of exact protocols that smoothly interpolate between the two extremes of minimizing average work or fluctuations. Interestingly, these optimal protocols are invariant under time reversal and can be understood in terms of a modified effective Péclet number, which captures the relative importance of the competing objectives. Overall, this framework places well-known optimal control results in a broader context: familiar single-objective solutions appear as limiting cases of a richer landscape of optimal trade-offs, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the limits of control in driven nonequilibrium systems."