Related papers: Principle of Minimal Work Fluctuations
The transition between a regime in which thermodynamic relations apply only to ensembles of small systems coupled to a large environment and a regime in which they can be used to characterize individual macroscopic systems is analyzed in…
The Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation theorem relate equilibrium free energy differences to non-equilibrium measurements of the work. These relations extend to single-molecule experiments that have probed the finite-time thermodynamics…
Using the Feynman-Kac formula, a work fluctuation theorem for a Brownian particle in a nonconfining potential, e.g., a potential well with finite depth, is derived. The theorem yields aninequality that puts a lower bound on the average work…
To define the work performed on a driven quantum system in a physically sound way has turned out to be a truly non-trivial task, except in some special cases of limited applicability. This topic has been in a focus of intense research…
The Jarzynski equality, which relates equilibrium free-energy difference to an average of non-equilibrium work, plays a central role in modern non-equilibrium statistical thermodynamics. In this paper, we study a weaker consequence of this…
A main goal of single-molecule experiments is to evaluate equilibrium free energy differences by applying fluctuation relations to repeated work measurements along irreversible processes. We quantify the error that is made in a free energy…
The fluctuation theorem is the fundamental equality in nonequilibrium thermodynamics that is used to derive many important thermodynamic relations, such as the second law of thermodynamics and the Jarzynski equality. Recently, the…
The formulation of the First and Second Principles of thermodynamics for a particle in contact with a heat bath and submitted to an external force is analyzed, by means of the Boltzmann-Lorentz kinetic equation. The possible definitions of…
The signature for a non-Fermi liquid behavior near a quantum phase transition has been observed in thermal and transport properties of many metallic systems at low temperatures. In the present work we consider specific examples of itinerant…
Gibbs and Boltzmann definitions of temperature agree only in the macroscopic limit. The ambiguity in identifying the equilibrium temperature of a finite sized `small' system exchanging energy with a bath is usually understood as a…
Fluctuations of thermodynamic observables, such as heat and work, contain relevant information on the underlying physical process. These fluctuations are however not taken into account in the traditional laws of thermodynamics. While the…
We formulate a thermodynamic theory applicable to both classical and quantum systems. These systems are depicted as thermodynamic system-bath models capable of handling isothermal, isentropic, thermostatic, and entropic processes. Our…
The status of heat and work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is quite confusing and non-unique at present with conflicting interpretations even after a long history of the first law in terms of exchange heat and work, and is far from…
Recent advances in experimental techniques allow one to measure and control systems at the level of single molecules and atoms. Here gaining information about fluctuating thermodynamic quantities is crucial for understanding nonequilibrium…
The celebrated exchange fluctuation theorem -- proposed by Jarzynski and W\'ozcik, (Phys Rev. Lett. 92, 230602 (2004)) for heat exchange between two systems in thermal equilibrium at different temperatures -- is explored here for quantum…
We study experimentally work fluctuations in a Szilard engine that extracts work from information encoded as the occupancy of an electron level in a semiconductor quantum dot. We show that as the average work extracted per bit of…
Based on the observation that the thermodynamic equilibrium free energy of an open quantum system in contact with a thermal environment can be understood as the difference between the free energy of the total system and that of the bare…
The thermodynamic behavior of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems in finite-time dynamics encompasses the description of energy fluctuations, which dictates a series of system's physical properties. In addition, strong interactions in…
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…
We study work extraction processes mediated by finite-time interactions with an ambient bath -- \emph{partial thermalizations} -- as continuous time Markov processes for two-level systems. Such a stochastic process results in fluctuations…