相关论文: Investigating the thermodynamics of small biosyste…
Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and…
Fluctuation theorems, such as the Jarzynski equality and the Crooks relation, are effective tools connecting non-equilibrium work statistics and equilibrium free energy differences. However, detailed hands-on, reproducible protocols for…
The description of nonequilibrium processes in nano-sized objects, where the typical energies involved are a few times, is increasingly becoming central to disciplines as diverse as condensed-matter physics, materials science, and…
Recent progress on micro- and nanometer scale manipulation has opened the possibility to probe systems small enough that thermal fluctuations of energy and coordinate variables can be significant compared with their mean behavior. We…
We investigate the dynamics of single microparticles immersed in water that are driven out of equilibrium in the presence of an additional external colored noise. As a case study, we trap a single polystyrene particle in water with optical…
Recent advances in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and single molecule technologies make it possible to extract free energy differences from irreversible work measurements in pulling experiments. To date, free energy recovery has been…
Brownian dynamics simulations are used to study the detachment of a particle from a substrate. Although the model is simple and generic, we attempt to map its energy, length and time scales onto a specific experimental system, namely a bead…
In this report I discuss fluctuation theorems and transient violations of the second law of thermodynamics in small systems. Special emphasis is placed on free-energy recovery methods in the framework of non-equilibrium single-molecule…
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…
Nonequilibrium processes of small systems such as molecular machines are ubiquitous in biology, chemistry and physics, but are often challenging to comprehend. In the past two decades, several exact thermodynamic relations of nonequilibrium…
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.…
In this work, we propose two models of coupled harmonic oscillators under Brownian motion to computationally study the applications of fluctuation theorems. This paper also illustrates how to analytically calculate free energy differences…
Thermodynamic probes can be used to deduce microscopic internal dynamics of nanoscale quantum systems. Several direct entropy measurement protocols based on charge transport measurements have been proposed and experimentally applied to…
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 remarkable accuracy and versatility of single-molecule techniques make possible new measurements that are not feasible in bulk assays. Among these, the precise estimation of folding free energies using fluctuation theorems in…
Recent single-molecule pulling experiments have shown how it is possible to manipulate RNA molecules using optical tweezers force microscopy. We investigate a minimal model for the experimental setup which includes a RNA molecule connected…
In this paper I am presenting an overview on several topics related to nonequilibrium fluctuations in small systems. I start with a general discussion about fluctuation theorems and applications to physical examples extracted from physics…
Two approaches to small-scale and quantum thermodynamics are fluctuation relations and one-shot statistical mechanics. Fluctuation relations (such as Crooks' Theorem and Jarzynski's Equality) relate nonequilibrium behaviors to equilibrium…
Particles that can be trapped in optical tweezers range from tens of microns down to tens of nanometres in size. Interestingly, this size range includes large macromolecules. We show experimentally, in agreement with theoretical…
The large-deviation method can be used to study the measurement trajectories of open quantum systems. For optical arrangements this formalism allows to describe the long time properties of the (non-equilibrium) photon counting statistics in…