Nonequilibrium stochastic thermodynamics of boundary functionals: From Zubarev's ensemble to stochastic particle separation

Abstract

This paper develops a generalization of Zubarev's nonequilibrium statistical operator method for the case of simultaneous inclusion of additive and nonlocal boundary functionals of trajectories. Using a unified thermodynamic approach, a three-parameter model of nonequilibrium systems is constructed, including the first-passage time, the dwell time above a given level, and the absolute extremum of the process. A correspondence is demonstrated between the maximum information entropy method for trajectories and the Donsker-Varadan large deviation formalism. Using the Doob`s h-transform, it is demonstrated that fixing extremal functionals of history induces efficient non-Markovian transport in the system with dynamic adaptation to historical records. Criteria for the applicability of the developed apparatus in the "large time" domain and the possibilities of its use for optimizing stochastic particle separation in periodic potentials are discussed.