  Active constituents burn fuel to sustain individual motion, giving rise to
collective effects that are not seen in systems at thermal equilibrium, such as
phase separation with purely repulsive interactions. There is a great potential
in harnessing the striking phenomenology of active matter to build novel
controllable and responsive materials that surpass passive ones. Yet, we
currently lack a systematic roadmap to predict the protocols driving active
systems between different states in a way that is thermodynamically optimal.
Equilibrium thermodynamics is an inadequate foundation to this end, due to the
dissipation rate arising from the constant fuel consumption in active matter.
Here, we derive and implement a versatile framework for the thermodynamic
control of active matter. Combining recent developments in stochastic
thermodynamics and nonequilibrium response theory, our approach shows how to
find the optimal control for either continuous- or discrete-state active
systems operating arbitrarily far from equilibrium. Our results open the door
to designing novel active materials which are not only built to stabilize
specific nonequilibrium collective states, but are also optimized to switch
between different states at minimum dissipation.
