Related papers: How does pressure fluctuate in equilibrium?
A classical particle system coupled with a thermostat driven by an external constant force reaches its steady state when the ensemble-averaged drift velocity does not vary with time. The statistical mechanics of such a system is derived…
Small thermodynamic systems exhibit peculiar behavior different from that observed in long-scale systems. Non-equilibrium processes taking place in those systems are strongly influenced by the presence of fluctuations which can be large.…
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…
Stationary non-equilibrium states describe steady flows through macroscopic systems. Although they represent the simplest generalization of equilibrium states, they exhibit a variety of new phenomena. Within a statistical mechanics…
In the last ten years, a number of ``Conventional Fluctuation Theorems'' have been derived for systems with deterministic or stochastic dynamics, in a transient or in a non-equilibrium stationary state. These theorems gave explicit…
The fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems are under intense theoretical and experimental investigation. Topical ``fluctuation relations'' describe symmetries of the statistical properties of certain observables, in a variety of models and…
Correlations in fluids in nonequilibrium steady states are long ranged. Hence, finite-size effects have important consequences in the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of fluids. One consequence is that nonequilibrium temperature fluctuations…
The statistical mechanical basis of the fluctuation theory of mixtures is reviewed. An overview of the statistical mechanical relations between the microscopic properties of a system and its macroscopic properties is presented. The…
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…
Traditionally, it is understood that fluctuations in the equilibrium distribution are not evident in thermodynamic systems of large $N$ (the number of particles in the system) \cite{Huang1}. In this paper we examine the validity of this…
We use the work done on and the heat removed from a system to maintain it in a nonequilibrium steady state for a thermodynamic-like description of such a system as well as of its fluctuations. Based on a generalized Onsager-Machlup theory…
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…
We reconsider a well-known relationship between the fluctuation theorem and the second law of thermodynamics by evaluating a probability measure-valued process. In order to establish a bridge between microscopic and macroscopic behaviors,…
This paper addresses fundamental aspects of statistical mechanics such as the motivation of a classical state space with spontaneous transitions, the meaning of non-equilibrium in the context of thermalization, and the justification of…
The postulational basis of classical thermodynamics has been expanded to incorporate equilibrium fluctuations. The main additional elements of the proposed thermodynamic theory are the concept of quasi-equilibrium states, a definition of…
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
We consider the thermodynamic potential describing the macroscopic fluctuation of the current and local energy of a general class of Hamiltonian models including aerogels. We argue that this potential is neither analytic nor strictly…
There has been great interest in applying the results of statistical mechanics to single molecule experiements. Recent work has highlighted so-called non-equilibrium work-energy relations and Fluctuation Theorems which take on an…
We consider stochastic thermodynamics as a theory of statistical inference for experimentally observed fluctuating time-series. To that end, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the knowledge about the dynamical state of the…
The volume fluctuations in statistical mechanics are discussed. First, the volume fluctuations in ensembles with a fixed external pressure, the so called pressure ensembles, are considered. Second, a generalization of the pressure ensembles…