Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Felix Ritort: Fluctuations in open systems

Fluctuation theorems (FTs) establish fundamental identities about energy exchanges between a nonequilibrium system and its environment. Interest in such relations has been boosted by the possibility of applying perturbations to mesoscopic systems undergoing irreversible processes. While most recent research focused on classical systems, in a paper in Physical Review Letters, Michele Campisi, Peter Talkner, and Peter Hänggi ( Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 210401 (2009) ), at the University of Augsburg in Germany, have now extended FTs to open quantum systems, paving the way for further progress in scenarios ranging from Bose-Einstein condensates to metallic nanowires.

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