https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00254-2
Nonequilibrium work relations: foundations and applications
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Institute for Physical Science and Technology
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA
Corresponding author: a cjarzyns@umd.edu
Received:
2
September
2007
Revised:
21
March
2008
Published online:
3
July
2008
When a macroscopic system in contact with a heat reservoir is driven away from equilibrium, the second law of thermodynamics places a strict bound on the amount of work performed on the system. With a microscopic system the situation is more subtle, as thermal fluctuations give rise to a statistical distribution of work values. In recent years it has been realized that such distributions encode surprisingly more information than one might expect from traditional thermodynamic arguments. I will discuss a number of exact results that relate equilibrium properties of the system, in particular free energy differences, to the fluctuations in the work performed during such a nonequilibrium process. I will describe the theoretical foundations of these relations, connections with irreversibility and the second law of thermodynamics, and potential experimental and computational applications.
PACS: 05.70.Ln – Nonequilibrium and irreversible thermodynamics / 05.40.-a – Fluctuation phenomena, random processes, noise, and Brownian motion / 82.37.Rs – Single molecule manipulation of proteins and other biological molecules
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2008
