title: Conservation laws and symmetries in stochastic thermodynamics.
abstract: Phenomenological nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how fluxes of conserved quantities, such as matter, energy, and charge, flow from outer reservoirs across a system and how they irreversibly degrade from one form to another. Stochastic thermodynamics is formulated in terms of probability fluxes circulating in the system's configuration space. The consistency of the two frameworks is granted by the condition of local detailed balance, which specifies the amount of physical quantities exchanged with the reservoirs during single transitions between configurations. We demonstrate that the topology of the configuration space crucially determines the number of independent thermodynamic affinities (forces) that the reservoirs generate across the system and provides a general algorithm that produces the fundamental affinities and their conjugate currents contributing to the total dissipation, based on the interplay between macroscopic conservations laws for the currents and microscopic symmetries of the affinities.
authors.affiliation: Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics, Physics and Materials Science Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, Campus Limpertsberg, 162a avenue de la Faïencerie, L-1511 Luxembourg (G. D. Luxembourg).
authors.forename: Matteo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Polettini
authors.affiliation: Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics, Physics and Materials Science Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, Campus Limpertsberg, 162a avenue de la Faïencerie, L-1511 Luxembourg (G. D. Luxembourg).
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Bulnes-Cuetara
authors.affiliation: Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics, Physics and Materials Science Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, Campus Limpertsberg, 162a avenue de la Faïencerie, L-1511 Luxembourg (G. D. Luxembourg).
authors.forename: Massimiliano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Esposito