Related papers: Paths of fluctuation induced switching
Regarding metric fluctuations as generating {\it roughness} on the fabric of the otherwise smooth vacuum, it is shown that in its simplest form, the effect can be described by the scalar $\phi^4$ model. The model exhibits a second order…
We present a theoretical investigation of thermal fluctuation statistics in a molecular motor. Energy transfer in the motor is described using a multidimensional discrete master equation with nearest-neighbor hopping. In this theory, energy…
The temporal evolution of microwave pulses transmitted through random dielectric samples is obtained from the Fourier transform of field spectra. Large fluctuations are found in the local or single channel delay time, which is the first…
Electron transport through amorphous monatomic metallic structures generated earlier by molecular dynamics simulations is studied numerically. The interference of electronic trajectories backscattered by the structural disorder probes the…
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel…
The fundamental insight into Brownian motion by Einstein is that all substances exhibit continual fluctuations due to thermal agitation balancing with the frictional resistance. However, even at thermal equilibrium, biological activity can…
We study the sum of first passage times along an arbitrary cycle made up of N>2 states of a small physical system. We show that, if the system is at thermodynamic equilibrium, this sum follows the same probability distribution regardless of…
We study a mechanism for reliable switching in biomolecular signal-transduction cascades. Steady bistable states are created by system-size cooperative effects in populations of proteins, in spite of the fact that the phosphorylation-state…
We consider a generic class of gene circuits affected by nonlinear extrinsic noise. To address this nonlinearity we introduce a general perturbative methodology based on assuming timescale separation between noise and genes dynamics, with…
We study the dynamics of elastic interfaces-membranes-immersed in thermally excited fluids. The work contains three components: the development of a numerical method, a purely theoretical approach, and numerical simulation. In developing a…
We discuss fluctuations near the second order phase transition where the free energy has an additional non-Hermitian term. The spectrum of the fluctuations changes when the odd-parity potential amplitude exceeds the critical value…
The shape of experimentally observed R(T) transition of thin superconducting wires is analyzed. Broadening of the transition in quasi-1-dimensional superconducting channels is typically associated with phase slip mechanism provided by…
We explore fluctuation relations in a periodically driven micromechanical torsional oscillator. In the linear regime where the modulation is weak, we verify that the ratio of the work variance to the mean work is constant, consistent with…
Large deviation theory provides a framework to understand macroscopic fluctuations and collective phenomena in many-body nonequilibrium systems in terms of microscopic dynamics. In these lecture notes we discuss the large deviation…
Thermodynamic parameters such as temperature and pressure can be defined from the statistical behavior of a system. Therefore, thermal fluctuation is an inseparable characteristic of these parameters which eventually finds its way into…
In this work, we consider a finite-state inhomogeneous-time Markov chain whose probabilities of transition from one state to another tend to decrease over time. This can be seen as a cooling of the dynamics of an underlying Markov chain. We…
Small systems in contact with a heat bath evolve by stochastic dynamics. Here we show that, when one such small system is weakly coupled to another one, it is possible to infer the presence of such weak coupling by observing the violation…
We study the combined effect of thermal and quantum fluctuations in a zero dimensional superconductor. By using path integral techniques, we obtain novel expressions for the partition function and the superconducting order parameter which…
A microscopic model of interacting oscillators, which admits two conserved quantities, volume, and energy, is investigated. We begin with a system driven by a general nonlinear potential under high-temperature regime by taking the inverse…
A fluctuation theorem is examined for the first-passage time of a biomolecular machine (e.g., a motor protein or an enzyme) in a nonequilibrium steady-state. For such machines in which the driven, observable process is coupled to a hidden…