Thermodynamic Networks: Harnessing Non-Equilibrium Steady States for Computation (opens in new tab)

We introduce thermodynamic networks, a general framework for autonomous, physics-based computation using non-equilibrium steady states. These networks are modeled as a collection of finite-size reservoirs that exchange conserved quantities--such as electric charge or molecular number--while relaxing to a non-equilibrium steady state, which encodes the solution of a computational problem. We identify Negative Differential Conductance (NDC) as t...