Related papers: Non-equilibrium statistical physics, transitory ep…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
Although coarse-grained models have been widely used to explain exotic phenomena in complex fluids, such as droplet formation in living cells, these conventional approaches often fail to capture the intricate microscopic degrees of freedom…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
We give an introduction to phase transitions in the steady states of systems that evolve stochastically with equilibrium and nonequilibrium dynamics, the latter defined as those that do not possess a time-reversal symmetry. We try as much…
We consider nonequilibrium systems with complex dynamics in stationary states with large fluctuations of intensive quantities (e.g. the temperature, chemical potential, or energy dissipation) on long time scales. Depending on the…
Since Newton, all classical and quantum physics depends upon the "Newtonian Paradigm". Here the relevant variables of the system are identified. The boundary conditions creating the phase space of all possible values of the variables are…
The foundations of statistical mechanics, namely how equilibrium hypothesis emerges microscopically from quantum theory, is explored through investigating the environment-induced quantum decoherence processes. Based on the recent results on…
Within the abstract framework of dynamical system theory we describe a general approach to the Transient (or Evans-Searles) and Steady State (or Gallavotti-Cohen) Fluctuation Theorems of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Our main…
Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
An open question in the field of non-equilibrium statistical physics is whether there exists a unique way through which non-equilibrium systems equilibrate irrespective of how far they are away from equilibrium. To answer this question we…
In this paper we investigate the applicability of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to non-equilibrium damage phenomena. As an example, a fiber-bundle model with thermal noise and a fiber-bundle model with decay of fibers are…
In order to better understand the occurrence of phase transitions, we adopt an approach based on the study of energy landscapes: The relation between stationary points of the potential energy landscape of a classical many-particle system…
Despite the importance of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in modern physics and related fields, the topic is often omitted from undergraduate and core-graduate curricula. Key aspects of non-equilibrium physics, however, can be…
Formulating quantitative and predictive models for tissue development requires consideration of the complex, stochastic gene expression dynamics, its regulation via cell-to-cell interactions, and cell proliferation. Including all of these…
We distinguish a mechanical representation of the world in terms of point masses with positions and momenta and the chemical representation of the world in terms of populations of different individuals, each with intrinsic stochasticity,…
In these lectures, we shall present some remarkable results that have been obtained for systems far from equilibrium during the last two decades. We shall put a special emphasis on the concept of large deviation functions that provide us…