Limits of predictions in thermodynamic systems: a review
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1707.06680.pdf
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1.33 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Marsland, Robert
England, Jeremy L.
Date Issued
November 2017
Journal
Reports on Progress in Physics
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Marsland, Robert, and Jeremy England. “Limits of Predictions in Thermodynamic Systems: a Review.” Reports on Progress in Physics 81, 1 (November 2017): 016601
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, thanks to advances in the theory of stochastic processes and in their thermodynamic interpretation. Fluctuation theorems provide fundamental constraints on the dynamics of systems arbitrarily far from thermal equilibrium. Thermodynamic uncertainty relations bound the dissipative cost of precision in a wide variety of processes. Concepts of excess work and excess heat provide the basis for a complete thermodynamics of nonequilibrium steady states, including generalized Clausius relations and thermodynamic potentials. But these general results carry their own limitations: fluctuation theorems involve exponential averages that can depend sensitively on unobservably rare trajectories; steady-state thermodynamics makes use of a dual dynamics that lacks any direct physical interpretation. This review aims to present these central results of contemporary nonequilibrium thermodynamics in such a way that the power of each claim for making physical predictions can be clearly assessed, using examples from current topics in soft matter and biophysics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/AA9101
