Fluctuations in open systems
Date: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 @ 23:16:15 UTC
Topic: Science
 by Felix Ritort / Small Biosystems Lab, Departament de Fisica Fonamental, Facultat de Fisica, Universitat de Barcelona, Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Published May 26, 2009/ Physics 2, 43 (2009)
Small nonequilibrium systems behave quite unexpectedly when in contact with a thermal reservoir. However, all of them—from molecular machines to molecular magnets—are described by a single fluctuation theorem
.A Viewpoint on: Fluctuation Theorem for Arbitrary Open Quantum Systems by Michele Campisi, Peter Talkner, and Peter Hänggi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 210401 (2009) – Published May 26, 2009
... In 1997, Chris Jarzynski, then at the Los Alamos National laboratory, found a remarkable result for nonequilibrium scenarios [2].
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the total work is more
than the reversible work: the difference between actual work and
reversible work is equal to the net heat produced by dissipative forces
and transferred from a system to the bath...
Full article: http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/43
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