According to a well-known quote by Einstein, thermodynamics is the only physical theory of universal content which will never be overthrown. Recent years have however seen unexpected generalizations of thermodynamics to single mesoscopic systems which are not in the thermodynamic limit. Although the established name has become "stochastic thermodynamics", an equally good or better term could have been "thermodynamic stochastics" since the main point is to introduce a thermodynamic point of view on systems described by stochastic laws, typically Markov processes. The main results of this science is a number of exact relations between fluctuating quantities which are called fluctuation relations. The simplest of these is the Jarzynski Equality stating that an exponential average of work (a non-equilibrium notion) equals the ratio of two partition functions (an equilibrium notion). This and other more refined relations have been used to determine the free energy differences of macromolecules in different conformations by measuring the work required to pull them apart many times, and then taking the proper average. The highest accuracy experimental tests of these relations, which are then rather tests that the premisses by which they have been derived hold, have on the other hand appeared in single-electron systems.

个人简介： Erik Aurell is Professor and Chair at KTH. He is co-PI of the recently granted Finnish Center of Excellence in Computational Inference Research (COIN), one of the largest and most high-profile efforts in Finnish science (Aalto University and University of Helsinki, 2012-2017). The proposed project partly builds on the synergies with COIN sub-project “Computational Biology and Medicine”, which he coordinates. And he led the project proposal writing process and coordinated for one year the FP6 Integrated Project “EVERGROW” (2005-2008), total EC funding 5.595 MEuro, his largest external funding to date (as PI).