Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 30: Statistical Physics far from Thermal Equilibrium

DY 30.5: Talk

Wednesday, April 3, 2019, 11:30–11:45, H6

Violation of Jarzynski Equality using catalysts — •Paul Boes¹, Rodrigo Gallego¹, Henrik Wilming², Nelly Ng¹, Markus Müller^3,4, and Jens Eisert¹ — ¹Freie Universität Berlin, Deutschland — ²ETH Zürich, Schweiz — ³IQOQI Wien, Österreich — ⁴Perimeter Institute, Kanada

Fluctuation theorems are concerned with the probability distributions of work in a scenario where we measure the energy of a system in a Gibbs state, evolve it unitarily and then measure the energy again. In this setting, the second law states that it is impossible to extract work on average, while fluctuation theorems impose further constraints on the fluctuations of work. In this work, we study a generalization of this typical setup that additionally allows for the use of catalytic systems. In this setting, the usual second law continues to hold, however, fluctuation theorems can be violated. In particular, we show that it is possible to extract, for large systems, a finite amount of work per particle with a finite probability. This can be recast as the statement that the Jarzynski equality can be violated by an amount which diverges exponentially with the system size, at the cost of having to use increasingly large catalytic systems.