Related papers: Thinking outside the box: fluctuations and finite …
We review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
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 revisit the model of a Brownian particle in a heat bath submitted to an actively controlled force proportional to the velocity that leads to thermal noise reduction (cold damping). We investigate the influence of the continuous feedback…
We develop the hypothesis that the dynamics of a given system may lead to the activity being constricted to a subset of space, characterized by a fractal dimension smaller than the space dimension. We also address how the response function…
Computer simulations of the Ising model exhibit white noise if thermal fluctuations are governed by Boltzmann's factor alone; whereas we find that the same model exhibits 1/f noise if Boltzmann's factor is extended to include local…
We derive a formula that defines quantum fluctuations of energy in subsystems of a hot relativistic gas. For small subsystem sizes we find substantial increase of fluctuations compared to those known from standard thermodynamic…
A hierarchy of equations for equilibrium reduced density matrices obtained earlier is used to consider systems of spinless bosons bound by forces of gravity alone. The systems are assumed to be at absolute zero of temperature under…
The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, thanks to advances in the theory of stochastic processes and in their thermodynamic interpretation. Fluctuation theorems provide fundamental…
The concept of weak invariants has recently been introduced in the context of conserved quantities in finite-time processes in nonequilibrium quantum thermodynamics. A weak invariant itself has a time-dependent spectrum, but its expectation…
The scaling of correlations as a function of system size provides important hints to understand critical phenomena on a variety of systems. Its study in biological systems offers two challenges: usually they are not of infinite size, and in…
It is possible to formulate the thermodynamics of a glass forming system in terms of the properties of inherent structures, which correspond to the minima of the potential energy and build up the potential energy landscape in the…
We review the general aspects of the concept of temperature in equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Although temperature is an old and well-established notion, it still presents controversial facets. After a short…
The event horizon is a source of irreversibility, analogous to statistical irreversibility. This is why for systems with an event horizon there is no difference between quantum and thermal fluctuations. Quantum processes of quantum…
We derive fluctuation relations for a many-body quantum system prepared in a Generalised Gibbs Ensemble subject to a general nonequilibrium protocol. By considering isolated integrable systems, we find generalisations to the Tasaki-Crooks…
A new method is proposed to numerically extract the diffusivity of a (typically nonlinear) diffusion equation from underlying stochastic particle systems. The proposed strategy requires the system to be in local equilibrium and have…
An earlier four-loop calculation of the fluctuation pressure of a fluid membrane between two infinite walls is extended to five loops. Variational perturbation theory is used to extract the hard-wall limit from perturbative results obtained…
Fluctuations strongly affect the dynamics and functionality of nanoscale thermal machines. Recent developments in stochastic thermodynamics have shown that fluctuations in many far-from-equilibrium systems are constrained by the rate of…
We study fluctuations in diffusion-limited reaction systems driven out of their stationary state. Using a numerically exact method, we investigate fluctuation ratios in various systems which differ by their level of violation of microscopic…
The fluctuation theorem is a pivotal result of statistical physics. It quantifies the probability of observing fluctuations which are in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it quantifies the ratio of the…
The second law of thermodynamics posits that in closed macroscopic systems the rate of entropy production must be positive. However, small systems can exhibit negative entropy production over short timescales, seemingly in contradiction…