Mapping nonequilibium into equilibrium

by Jorge Kurchan (ESPCI Paris)

Friday 12 Dec 2008, 14:15 → 15:15 Europe/Zurich

Univ. de Geneve, Auditoire Stueckelberg, 24 quai E. Ansermet

The fluctuations of out of equilibrium systems are much richer than those of equilibrium ones because time-reversibility is lost, and the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution does not hold. A general theory for large, smooth (`hydrodynamic') deviations has been developed in the last few years: it offers us a glimpse of what an out of equilibrium thermodynamics might one day look like. When applied to several simple yet non-trivial one-dimensional transport models, it was found that a complete analytic solution can be obtained. It turns out that at the bottom of this miracle is the fact that these systems have the unexpected feature that a non-local tranformation maps the driven version back into an equilibrium one. The domain of applicability of such a transformation, which is rather reminiscent of the Bosonization transformations in quantum spin chains, is at present an open question.