Nonequilibrium work theorem for a system strongly coupled to a thermal environment

By Christopher Jarzynski. 2004

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a recent paper (2004 J. Stat. Mech.: Theor. Exp. P07006), Cohen and Mauzerall (CM) have argued that the derivation of the nonequilibrium work relation given in a previous work of Jarzynski (1997 Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 2690) is flawed. Here I attempt to answer their criticisms, both by presenting a detailed version of that derivation and by addressing specific objections raised by CM. The derivation presented here is in fact somewhat stronger than the one I gave in 1997, as it does not rely on the assumption of a weak coupling term connecting the system of interest and its thermal environment.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/403798d1c4c3f49c9bfe48521fc8a0ad91e21a79

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Stochastic thermodynamics, fluctuation theorems and molecular machines (2012, background): “A related issue arises in the Hamiltonian derivation of the JR which requires some care in identifying the proper role of the heat bath during the process [62, 63].”
Nonequilibrium fluctuations in small systems: From physics to biology (2007, background): “The main assumption of FTs is microscopic reversibility or local equilibrium, an assumption that has received some criticism [191, 192, 193].”
Quantum thermodynamics (2015, background): “For example, resource theory work, Equation (50), is a work associated with an optimised thermal operations process – to move a work storage system almost deterministically as high as possible – while the fluctuating work concept, Equations (15) and (24), is applicable to general closed and open dyn”
Nonequilibrium fluctuations, fluctuation theorems, and counting statistics in quantum systems (2008, methodology): “In this section, we show that the FT (58) can be used to derive the Crooks [42, 43, 94] and the Jarzynski relations [95, 96, 97] in either isolated or closed driven quantum systems as well as a FT for for heat and particles exchange between two finite systems.”
Colloquium: Quantum fluctuation relations: Foundations and applications (2010, background): “The resulting fluctuation relations have been referred to as “exchange fluctuation theorems” (Jarzynski and Wójcik, 2004), to distinguish them from the “work fluctuation theorems”.”
Entropy production as correlation between system and reservoir (2009, background): “If we assume that the total system relaxes to a final canonical equilibrium at temperature β−1, this non-equilibrium free energy difference reduces to the equilibrium expression identified in the context of the work theorem in both the weak coupling [2, 4, 19] and strong coupling regimes [11, 12].”
Brownian motion: a paradigm of soft matter and biological physics (2005, background): “Both are to date still controversial and the subject of heate d debates (e. g. [ 66 ]).”
Colloquium : Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics at strong coupling: Quantum and classical (2019, background): “For total systems initially staying in a canonical state, the Jarzynski and the Crooks relations follow (Jarzynski, 2004).”