Welcome!

We are planning to restart our weekly discussion meetings on Condensed Matter Physics and Biological Physics with the topic - Stochastic Thermodynamics. The initial set of talks will be given by Rajesh Singh and then it will be followed up by other speakers.

Time and venue for the Discussion:

Time: Saturday, 2 PM
Venue: 326/327
Time and venue can be changed depending on availability. But changes will be communicated on the mailing list.

Discussion Plan:

Rajesh will start by discussing the following review article:

• Seifert, Udo. “Stochastic thermodynamics, fluctuation theorems and molecular machines.” Reports on Progress in Physics 75.12 (2012): 126001.

To quote from the article:

“Stochastic thermodynamics as reviewed here systematically provides a framework for extending the notions of classical thermodynamics such as work, heat and entropy production to the level of individual trajectories of well-defined non-equilibrium ensembles. It applies whenever a non-equilibrium process is still coupled to one (or several) heat bath(s) of constant temperature. Paradigmatic systems are single colloidal particles in time-dependent laser traps, polymers in external flow, enzymes and molecular motors in single molecule assays, small biochemical networks and thermoelectric devices involving single electron transport”.

In recent years, stochastic thermodynamics has attracted a lot of attention in various branches of statistical physics [1-4]. We plan to systematically discuss these topics over the course of our meetings.

Please let us know if you would like to join our mailing list.

Some references for the first talk:

1. Blickle, Valentin, and Clemens Bechinger. “Realization of a micrometre-sized stochastic heat engine.” Nature Physics 8.2 (2012): 143.
2. Sudeesh Krishnamurthy, Subho Ghosh, Dipankar Chatterji, Rajesh Ganapathy and A. K. Sood. “A micrometre-sized heat engine operating between bacterial reservoirs.” Nature Physics 12.12 (2016): 1134.
3. Ciliberto, S. “Experiments in stochastic thermodynamics: Short history and perspectives.” Physical Review X 7.2 (2017): 021051.
4. Elouard, Cyril, et al. “The role of quantum measurement in stochastic thermodynamics.” npj Quantum Information 3.1 (2017): 9.

For each discussion, we will have commenting facility through Disqus. This will enable people to discuss among each other even after the talk.