Dissipation bounds all steady-state current fluctuations

Abstract

Near equilibrium, small current fluctuations are described by a Gaussian with a linear-response variance regulated by the dissipation. Here, we demonstrate that dissipation still plays a dominant role in structuring large fluctuations arbitrarily far from equilibrium. In particular, we prove a linear-response-like bound on the large deviation function for currents in Markov jump processes. We find that nonequilibrium current fluctuations are always more likely than what is expected from a linear-response analysis. As a small-fluctuations corollary, we derive a recently-conjectured uncertainty bound on the variance of current fluctuations.