2020/09/02 by Tobias Thalheim, Marco Braun, Thalheim, Tobias +7
Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #FOS: Physical sciences #Field-Flow Fractionation Techniques #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2009.00950
arxiv created 2020/09/02 · openalex publication_date 2020/09/02 · arxiv updated 2020/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Jarzynski equality relates the free energy difference between two equilibrium states to the fluctuating irreversible work afforded to switch between them. The prescribed fixed temperature for the equilibrium states implicitly constrains the dissipative switching process that can take the system far from equilibrium. Here, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that such a relation also holds for the nonisothermal case, where the initial stationary state is not in equilibrium and the switching is effected by dynamically changing temperature gradients instead of a conservative force. Our demonstration employs a single colloidal particle trapped by optically induced thermophoretic drift currents. It relies on identifying suitable equivalents of classical work and heat and our ability to measure their distributions and express them in terms of a virtual potential.