The role of quenched disorder in non-equilibrium work and fluctuation theorems

研究了冻结无序在非平衡功和涨落定理中的作用。除了根据某些特定协议被赶出热力学平衡的系统和那些通过适当的边界条件保持在非平衡稳态的系统之外，玻璃系统还可以形成第三类一般的非平衡情况，涨落定理与之相关。在这些系统中，相互竞争的相互作用阻碍了完成平衡的途径，松弛以高度无序的亚稳态结束。这种状态的静态随机性可能有助于热力学熵，然后应该在涨落定理的适当版本中显示出来。除了对随机热力学的普遍兴趣外，涨落定理的静态无序作用与统计力学和信息论之间的几个引人入胜的问题有关，包括麦克斯韦妖的模型，获取和消除信息的热力学成本，以及处理遗传信息的准确性。对这些相当普遍的问题的研究将通过仔细研究最近介绍的一种携带信息的共聚物的非平衡生长模型而具体化和定性。

The role of frozen disorder in non-equilibrium work and fluctuation theorems is to be investigated. Besides systems that are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium according to some specific protocol and those that are kept in a non-equilibrium steady state by appropriate boundary conditions, glassy systems may form a third general class of non-equilibrium situations for which fluctuation theorems are relevant. In these systems competing interactions block the way to complete equilibration and relaxation ends in a highly disordered metastable state. The static randomness of this state may contribute to the thermodynamic entropy and should then show up in appropriate versions of fluctuation theorems. In addition to the general interest for stochastic thermodynamics the role of static disorder for fluctuation theorems is connected with several fascinating problems at the borderline between statistical mechanics and information theory including models of Maxwell's demon, the thermodynamic cost of acquisition and erasure of information, and the accuracy of processing genetic information. The investigation of these rather general issues will be made concrete and qualitative by scrutinizing a model for the non-equilibrium growth of an information carrying co-polymer introduced recently.