Beat of a current

Abstract

The fluctuation relation, a milestone of modern thermodynamics, is only established when a set of fundamental currents can be measured. Here we prove that it also holds for systems with hidden transitions if observations are carried ``at their own beat,'' that is, by stopping the experiment after a fixed number of visible transitions, rather than the elapse of an external clock time. This suggests that thermodynamic symmetries are more resistant to the loss of information when described in the space of transitions.