• Molecular motors
• stochastic thermodynamics
• bipartite systems
• chemical reaction networks
• no-pumping theorem

The subject matter of this thesis is the analysis of the molecular motors' working principles from a physics perspective.
Molecular motors are nano-scale devices that, as any other motor, consume energy in one form and convert it into motion and/or work.
Their peculiarity resides in the environment in which they operate, that is dominated by thermal fluctuations and viscosity.
These kinds of nano machines are ubiquitous in living organisms, where they perform sophisticated tasks by generating directional motion at the expense of some chemical fuel like adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
In parallel with the study of biological molecular motors, the last three decades have witnessed great progress in constructing synthetic molecular machines.
Despite being lower-performing than their biological counterparts, synthetic molecular motors offer significant advantages: great flexibility is made possible by molecular design, a broad range of energy sources can be used to power them, and the components often present high thermal and physical stability.
Moreover, synthetic motors can be realistically described by relatively simple models easy to characterize experimentally and which can then be used to improve their design.
Thus, synthetic molecular motors are particularly suited to be studied with physics tools such as stochastic thermodynamics, which is precisely what has been done in this thesis.
Within such a framework, the non-autonomous operation of two synthetic molecular motors is studied.
This type of operation, which is not found in biological motors, achieves directionality through an external periodic variation of the environment the motors are working in.