Relaxation of a colloidal particle into a nonequilibrium steady state

2009/02/28 by Valentin Blickle, Jakob Mehl, Clemens Bechinger
Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Colloid #Condensed matter physics #Materials science #Mechanics #Non-equilibrium thermodynamics #Optical tweezers #Optics #Particle (ecology) #Physical chemistry #Physics #Plasma #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum mechanics #Relaxation (psychology) #Statistical physics #Steady state (chemistry) #Thermal #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #Thermal equilibrium #Thermodynamics #Toroid #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.79.060104

published as Phys. Rev. E., 79, 060104(R) (2009)

arxiv created 2009/06/04 · openalex publication_date 2009/06/18 · arxiv updated 2015/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We study the relaxation of a single colloidal sphere which is periodically driven between two nonequilibrium steady states. Experimentally, this is achieved by driving the particle along a toroidal trap imposed by scanned optical tweezers. We find that the relaxation time after which the probability distributions have been relaxed is identical to the decay of the velocity autocorrelation function measured in a steady state. In quantitative agreement with theoretical calculations the relaxation time strongly increases when driving the system further away from thermal equilibrium.

Citations

• Einstein Relation Generalized to Nonequilibrium
• Characterizing potentials by a generalized Boltzmann factor
• Restoring a fluctuation-dissipation theorem in a nonequilibrium steady state
• Large deviation function for entropy production in driven one-dimensional systems
• On the Theory of the Brownian Motion
• Steady-State Thermodynamics of Langevin Systems
• The Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Small Systems