Geometric Dissipation Constraints in Stochastic Reaction Dynamics: A Variational Observable for Hidden Kinetic Structure in Energy Landscapes (opens in new tab)

We propose a geometric framework for characterizing hidden kinetic constraints in stochastic reaction dynamics. While free-energy barriers and entropy production provide global descriptors of thermodynamic behavior, they are largely insensitive to local geometric structure in configuration space that governs pathway selection. Starting from overdamped Langevin dynamics formulated as a gradient flow in Wasserstein space, we derive a variational f...