Falasco, Gianmaria*[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Physics and Materials Science Research Unit >]
Rao, Riccardo[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > >]
Esposito, Massimiliano*[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Physics and Materials Science Research Unit >]
* These authors have contributed equally to this work.
[en] e set up a rigorous thermodynamic description of reaction-diffusion systems driven out of equilibrium by time-dependent space-distributed chemostats. Building on the assumption of local equilibrium, nonequilibrium thermodynamic potentials are constructed exploiting the symmetries of the chemical network topology. It is shown that the canonical (resp. semigrand canonical) nonequilibrium free energy works as a Lyapunov function in the relaxation to equilibrium of a closed (resp. open) system and its variation provides the minimum amount of work needed to manipulate the species concentrations. The theory is used to study analytically the Turing pattern formation in a prototypical reaction-diffusion system, the one-dimensional Brusselator model, and to classify it as a genuine thermodynamic nonequilibrium phase transition.