Thermal forces from a microscopic perspective

Thermal gradients lead to macroscopic fluid motion if a confining surface is present along the gradient. This fundamental nonequilibrium effect, known as thermo-osmosis, is held responsible for particle thermophoresis in colloidal suspensions. A unified approach for thermo-osmosis in liquids and in gases is still lacking. Linear Response Theory is generalised to inhomogeneous systems,leading to an exact microscopic theory for the thermo-osmotic flow showing that the effect originates from two independent physical mechanisms, playing different roles in the gas and liquid phases, reducing to known expressions in the appropriate limits.