A microscopic heat engine with many hidden variables

RESUMO

Microscopic motors are commonly monitored through a single mechanical coordinate, whereas the chemical, conformational, or rotational cycles that sustain their motion remain unresolved. Mechanical stall is defined by the vanishing of the mean observed velocity; this scalar condition, however, does not generally imply thermodynamic reversibility. We analyze an overdamped Brownian motor in which one observed coordinate is coupled to several internal phases through a single shared interaction potential. Because the transmitted force and the reaction torques derive from the same energy, the resulting rank-one reciprocal structure yields an exact pointwise identity between the observed and hidden probability currents. This identity provides an exact expression for the entropy production at stall for an arbitrary periodic interaction. In particular, a positive current-square dissipation in the mechanical channel, defined from the full stationary state through the coupling-coordinate-resolved local velocity, determines together with the stall load the collective hidden current projected onto the coupling direction. The stationary one-coordinate marginal current nevertheless vanishes identically at stall; consequently, the stationary marginal density and mean displacement current do not determine this dissipation. Hidden currents orthogonal to the coupling direction dissipate without affecting the observed motion and generate an irreducible contribution that cannot be inferred from the rank-one mechanical channel.