Information bounds the robustness of self-organized systems

Abstract: Self-assembled systems, from synthetic nanostructures to developing organisms, are composed of fluctuating units capable of forming robust functional structures despite noise. In this Letter we ask: are there fundamental bounds on the robustness of self-organized nano-systems? By viewing self-organization as noisy encoding, we prove that the positional information capacity of short-range classical systems with discrete states obeys a bound reminiscent of area laws for quantum information. This universal bound can be saturated by fine-tuning transport coefficients. When long-range correlations are present, global constraints reduce the need for fine-tuning by providing effective integral feedback. Our work identifies bio-mimetic principles for the self-assembly of synthetic nanosystems and rationalizes, on purely information-theoretic grounds, why scale separation and hierarchical structures are common motifs in biology.