The length of time's arrow
Statistical Mechanics
2008-11-26 v1
Abstract
An unresolved problem in physics is how the thermodynamic arrow of time arises from an underlying time reversible dynamics. We contribute to this issue by developing a measure of time-symmetry breaking, and by using the work fluctuation relations, we determine the time asymmetry of recent single molecule RNA unfolding experiments. We define time asymmetry as the Jensen-Shannon divergence between trajectory probability distributions of an experiment and its time-reversed conjugate. Among other interesting properties, the length of time's arrow bounds the average dissipation and determines the difficulty of accurately estimating free energy differences in nonequilibrium experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0809.0025,
title = {The length of time's arrow},
author = {Edward H. Feng and Gavin E. Crooks},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.0025},
year = {2008}
}