Autonomous Thermal Switching Outperforms the Frozen Optimum with Vanishing Correlations

Can autonomous thermal switching outperform the best frozen barrier allocation while keeping system–auxiliary correlations arbitrarily small? We establish this relaxation advantage at fixed lowering budget and visible equilibrium, preserving joint detailed balance. On finite reversible networks, optimal fast switching mixes profiles concentrating the budget on single edges. A three-state model gives a strict gain and its finite-rate threshold. Faster switching preserves the gain while correlations vanish throughout relaxation. Collective and continuous models suggest a colloidal test.