Jarzynski equality

From SklogWiki
Revision as of 13:44, 15 June 2011 by Carl McBride (talk | contribs) (Slight tidy + Cite)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The Jarzynski equality is also known as the work relation or non-equilibrium work relation. According to this equality, the equilibrium Helmholtz energy function of a process, (), can be reconstructed by averaging the external work, , performed in many non-equilibrium realizations of the process (Eq. 2a in [1]):

or can be trivially re-written as (Eq. 2b)

where is the Boltzmann constant and is the temperature. The only assumption in the proof of this relation is that of a weak coupling between the system and the reservoir.

References

Related reading