Self-assembly is a process in which components in a system organize themselves into structures and patterns without human intervention. Though design principles for self-assembly for systems at global or local equilibrium have seen many advances recently, there has not been much progress for self-assembly far from equilibrium. Indeed, many important processes in biophysics and chemistry occur far from equilibrium. Using the ideas from stochastic thermodynamics, we have developed a general framework that can be used to constrain the set of configurations allowed to the non-equilibrium self-assembly. Our framework only requires information of the system at equilibrium, the average growth rate, and its fluctuations. Our framework can potentially be used to explore the tradeoffs between energy consumption and organization in synthetic and biophysical contexts.

Design principles for non-equilibrium self-assembly

256th National Meeting (2018)

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