Equalities and Inequalities: Irreversibility and the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the Nanoscale

By Christopher Jarzynski. 2011

969 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The reason we never observe violations of the second law of thermodynamics is in part a matter of statistics: When ∼1023 degrees of freedom are involved, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against the possibility of seeing significant deviations away from the mean behavior. As we turn our attention to smaller systems, however, statistical fluctuations become more prominent. In recent years it has become apparent that the fluctuations of systems far from thermal equilibrium are not mere background noise, but satisfy strong, useful, and unexpected properties. In particular, a proper accounting of fluctuations allows us to rewrite familiar inequalities of macroscopic thermodynamics as equalities. This review describes some of this progress, and argues that it has refined our understanding of irreversibility and the second law.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, AI for Physical Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics (2015, background): “In thermodynamics the schedule taken when moving between equilibrium distributions determines how much free energy is lost [38, 17].”
Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Chemical Reaction Networks: Wisdom from Stochastic Thermodynamics (2016, background): “[15] Christopher Jarzynski, “Equalities and inequalities: Irreversibility and the second law of thermodynamics at the nanoscale,” Annu.”
Colloquium: Quantum fluctuation relations: Foundations and applications (2010, background): “The existing reviews on this topic mostly cover classical fluctuation relations (Jarzynski, 2008, 2011; Marconi et al., 2008; Rondoni and Mej́ıa-Monasterio, 2007; Seifert, 2008), while the comprehensive review by Esposito et al. (2009) provides a solid, though in parts technical account of the…”
Quantum Fluctuation Theorems for Arbitrary Environments: Adiabatic and Nonadiabatic Entropy Production (2017, background): “The recent introduction of an entropy for stochastic trajectories [1] allows one to refine these inequalities with exact equalities for arbitrary nonequilibrium processes, results generically known as fluctuation theorems (FT’s) [2, 3].”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “Stochastic thermodynamics in active baths: Stochastic thermodynamics is an emergent field of research (Jarzynski, 2011; Seifert, 2012).”
Irreversibility in Active Matter Systems: Fluctuation Theorem and Mutual Information (2018, background): “Many such relations have been found over the last two decades [33, 34, 37–39], which, in their integrated forms, typically yield refinements of the second law of thermodynamics [33, 38, 40].”
Stochastic thermodynamics: From principles to the cost of precision (2017, background): “A more comprehensive guide to the vast literature concerning refinements and theoretical and experimental case studies, can be found, inter alia, in several recent reviews [1, 2, 3, 4].”
Description of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes requires constraints beyond free energy (2014, methodology): “Speciﬁcally, we compare with ﬂuctuation theorem approaches 53–56 that supply powerful descriptions of systems far from equilibrium.”