Physics (Internal)

Dissipation Bounds All Steady-State Current Fluctuations

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract: Near equilibrium, small current fluctuations are described by a Gaussian distribution 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.