1206.7049 (O. -P. Saira et al.)

Test of Jarzynski and Crooks fluctuation relations in an electronic
system    [PDF]

O. -P. Saira, Y. Yoon, T. Tanttu, M. Möttönen, D. V. Averin, J. P. Pekola

Everyday concepts such as heat and mechanical work have their foundation in dynamics at the atomic and molecular scale, which is typically unobservable in macroscopic samples [1]. Recent progress on micro- and nanometer scale manipulation has opened the possibility to probe systems small enough that thermal fluctuations of energy and coordinate variables can be significant compared with their mean behavior [2]. Theoretical tools in the form of exact fluctuation theorems have been developed to describe these phenomena [3,4]. They have been successfully applied in the interpretation of, e.g., experiments performed on individual complex biomolecules [5-7] and colloidal particles [8]. We present an experimental study of nonequilibrium thermodynamics in one of the simplest conceivable classical systems, namely a metallic single-electron box [9-11] with two active charge states. A comprehensive microscopic theory exists for the system [12], enabling the experimental distributions of thermodynamical quantities to be reproduced without fitting parameters.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.7049