Energy dissipation from thermodynamic incompatibility

Energy dissipation in kinetic systems often arises from explicit driving mechanisms that break detailed balance. The resulting nonequilibrium steady states exhibit nonzero probability currents, leading to irreversible dissipative cycles in the dynamics. We explore a class of systems where detailed balance is broken, not by implicit driving, but rather by the combination of multiple equilibrium mechanisms that are thermodynamically incompatible. This mechanism arises in the active Ising model and in networks of noisy oscillators, where equilibrium processes such as diffusion, spin alignment, and phase exchange combine to produce nonequilibrium collective behaviors: flocking and synchronization. We further develop a minimal model of collective adaptation in which the nonequilibrium behavior can be tuned between regimes driven by microscopic irreversibility, thermodynamic incompatibility, or a combination of both. We show that the manner in which detailed balance is broken, together with competition between timescales of the underlying equilibrium processes, leads to distinct behaviors of the collective dissipation rate near critical transitions. Our work identifies scenarios leading to either peaked or monotonic critical dissipation.