In this paper I am presenting an overview on several topics related to nonequilibrium fluctuations in small systems. I start with a general discussion about fluctuation theorems and applications to physical examples extracted from physics and biology: a bead in an optical trap and single molecule force experiments. Next I present a general discussion on path thermodynamics and consider distribu...

The Fluctuation Theorem (FT) gives an analytic expression for the probability, in a nonequilibrium system of finite size observed for a finite time, that the dissipative flux will flow in the reverse direction to that required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the present letter a Local version of the Fluctuation Theorem (LFT), is derived. We find that in the case of planar Poiseuille flo...

Chaos in the motion of atoms and molecules composing fluids is a new topic in nonequilibrium physics. Relationships have been established between the characteristic quantities of chaos and the transport coefficients thanks to the concept of fractal repeller and the escape-rate formalism. Moreover, the hydrodynamic modes of relaxation to the thermodynamic equilibrium as well as the nonequilibriu...

Gibbsian equilibrium statistical thermodynamics is the theoretical foundation for isothermal, closed chemical, and biochemical reaction systems. This theory, however, is not applicable to most biochemical reactions in living cells, which exhibit a range of interesting phenomena such as free energy transduction, temporal and spatial complexity, and kinetic proofreading. In this article, a nonequ...

A central problem in machine learning involves modeling complex data-sets using highly flexible families of probability distributions in which learning, sampling, inference, and evaluation are still analytically or computationally tractable. Here, we develop an approach that simultaneously achieves both flexibility and tractability. The essential idea, inspired by non-equilibrium statistical ph...

The purpose of this work is to discuss recent progress in deriving the fundamental laws of thermodynamics (0, 1 and 2-law) from nonequilibrium quantum statistical mechanics. Basic thermodynamic notions are clarified and different reversible and irreversible thermodynamic processes are studied from the point of view of quantum statistical mechanics. Special emphasis is put on new adiabatic theor...

In general, when a black hole evaporates, there arises a net energy flow from black hole into its outside environment due to Hawking radiation and energy accretion onto black hole. The existence of energy flow means that the thermodynamic state of the whole system, which consists of a black hole and its environment, is in a nonequilibrium state. To know the detail of evaporation process, the no...

Entropy serves as a central observable in equilibrium thermodynamics. However, many biological and ecological systems operate far from thermal equilibrium. Here we show that entropy production can characterize the behavior of such nonequilibrium systems. To this end we calculate the entropy production for a population model that displays nonequilibrium behavior resulting from cyclic competition...

In this paper, we revisit the notion of the “minus logarithm of stationary probability” as a generalized potential in nonequilibrium systems and attempt to illustrate its central role in an axiomatic approach to stochastic nonequilibrium thermodynamics of complex systems. It is demonstrated that this quantity arises naturally through both monotonicity results of Markov processes and as the rate...

A computational multiscale method is proposed to simulate coupled, nonequilibrium thermomechanical processes. This multiscale framework couples together thermomechanical equations at the coarse scale with nonequilibrium molecular dynamics at the fine scale. The novel concept of distributed coarse scale thermostats enables subsets of fine scale atoms to be attached to different coarse scale node...