Thermodynamics as a nonequilibrium path integral

Abstract

Thermodynamics is a well developed tool to study systems in equilibrium but no such general framework is available for non-equilibrium processes. Only hope for a quantitative description is to fall back upon the equilibrium language as often done in biology. This gap is bridged by the work theorem. By using this theorem we show that the Barkhausen-type non-equilibrium noise in a process, repeated many times, can be combined to construct a special matrix ${\cal S}$ whose principal eigenvector provides the equilibrium distribution. For an interacting system ${\cal S}$, and hence the equilibrium distribution, can be obtained from the free case without any requirement of equilibrium.