Entropy production of the contact model

Abstract We propose an expression for the production of entropy for a system described by a stochastic dynamics which is appropriate for the case where the reverse transition rate vanishes but the forward transition is nonzero. The expression is positive definite and based on the inequality x ln ⁡ x − ( x − 1 ) ⩾ 0 . The corresponding entropy flux is linear in the probability distribution allowing its calculation as an average. The expression is applied to the one-dimensional contact process at the stationary state. We found that the rate of entropy production per site is finite with a singularity at the critical point with diverging slope.