Microreversibility and driven Brownian motion with hydrodynamic long-time correlations

Abstract

A nonequilibrium fluctuation theorem is established for a colloidal particle driven by an external force within the hydrodynamic theory of Brownian motion, describing hydrodynamic memory effects such as the t^(-3/2) power-law decay of the velocity autocorrelation function. The generalized Langevin equation is obtained for the general case of slip boundary conditions between the particle and the fluid. The Gaussian probability distributions for the particle to evolve in position-velocity space are deduced. It is proved that the joint probability distributions of forward and time-reversed paths have a ratio depending only on the work performed by the external force and the fluid temperature, in spite of the nonMarkovian character of the generalized Langevin process.