Thermodynamics and Complexity

Dear Colleagues,

Research at the intersection of thermodynamics and complexity science seeks to understand how ordered, adaptive, and intelligent behaviour can emerge in nonequilibrium systems, often involving many interacting parts. This is an active and multidisciplinary field connecting physics, information theory, biology, and systems science.

In past decades, understanding complex systems from the lens of thermodynamics has been especially fruitful in the far-from-equilibrium regime, within areas that include atmospheric dynamics, chemical oscillations, and reaction–diffusion systems. It has contributed to physical insights into the process of self-organization that underlies dissipative structures like Turing patterns and Bénard cells. Together with notions of evolutionary dynamics, molecular self-assembly, and information storage, thermodynamics has shed light on the plethora of ordered structures of diverse complexity that has occurred in the biological world. It leads to studies on how life maintains order and function despite the second law, with concepts such as energy flow and entropy production applied to illuminate the cost of replication, adaptation, and evolution.

Recently, a new framework known as stochastic thermodynamics has shown great promise in elucidating small fluctuating complex systems, such as protein motors, enzymes, RNA, and DNA. When information is brought into the picture, it gives rise to the paradigm of information thermodynamics, which explores the thermodynamic cost of information processing in these tiny biological systems.

In this Special Issue, we seek contributions on the various ways in which thermodynamics can relate to complexity science, or complexity science can advance thermodynamics, with the aim of pushing the frontier of our understanding on the emergence of the remarkable complexities that occur across multiple length and time scales of the natural world.

Prof. Dr. Lock Yue Chew
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Complexities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• nonequilibrium thermodynamics
• complex systems
• statistical physics
• stochastic thermodynamics
• self-organization
• adaptation