Microreversibility, nonequilibrium current fluctuations, and response theory

Abstract

Microreversibility rules the fluctuations of the currents flowing across open systems in nonequilibrium (or equilibrium) steady states. As a consequence, the statistical cumulants of the currents and their response coefficients at arbitrary orders in the deviations from equilibrium obey time-reversal symmetry relations. It is shown that these relations allow us to systematically reduce the amount of independent quantities that need to be measured experimentally or computed theoretically in order to fully characterize the linear and nonlinear transport properties of general open systems. This reduction is shown to approach one half for quantities of arbitrarily high orders.