Connections Between Minimum-Work Protocols and Transition Paths

In this chapter, a direct comparison between the designed minimum-work protocols from Chap. 4 and the spontaneous transition mechanism for magnetization inversion in a 3 \(\times \) 3 Ising model is presented. Designed protocols are found to capture general features of the spontaneous mechanism and energetics given the constraints on the control parameters. Based on these results, the conditions under which a strong correspondence between efficient control protocols and spontaneous transition mechanisms could be found are discussed (Material in this chapter also appears in Ref. Louwerse, Thesis code for 2D Ising model, 2022. https://github.com/mdlouwerse/MDL_thesis_code ).