Statistical dynamics of driven systems of confined interacting particles in the overdamped-motion regime

Systems consisting of confined, interacting particles doing overdamped motion admit an effective description in terms of nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations. The behavior of these systems is closely related to the _S power-law entropies and can be interpreted in terms of the _S-based thermostatistics. The connection between overdamped systems and the _S measures provides valuable insights on diverse physical problems, such as the dynamics of interacting vortices in type-II superconductors. The _S-thermostatistical approach to the study of many-body systems described by nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations has been intensively explored in recent years, but most of these efforts were restricted to systems affected by time-independent external potentials. Here, we extend this treatment to systems evolving under time-dependent external forces. We establish a lower bound on the work done by these forces when they drive the system during a transformation. The bound is expressed in terms of a free energy based on the _S entropy and is satisfied even if the driving forces are not derivable from a potential function. It constitutes a generalization, for systems governed by nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations involving general time-dependent external forces, of the H-theorem satisfied by these systems when the external forces arise from a time-independent potential.