2015/12/31 by Todd R. Gingrich, Jordan M. Horowitz, Nikolay Perunov +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.116.120601
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 120601 (2016) · 5 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2016/02/04 · arxiv updated 2016/03/30
Near equilibrium, small current fluctuations are described by a Gaussian with a linear-response variance regulated by the dissipation. Here, we demonstrate that dissipation still plays a dominant role in structuring large fluctuations arbitrarily far from equilibrium. In particular, we prove a linear-response-like bound on the large deviation function for currents in Markov jump processes. We find that nonequilibrium current fluctuations are always more likely than what is expected from a linear-response analysis. As a small-fluctuations corollary, we derive a recently-conjectured uncertainty bound on the variance of current fluctuations.