Measurement of work in single-molecule experiments

Details Measurement of work in single-molecule experiments Measurement of work in single-molecule experiments

2009-05-26

arxiv.org/abs/0905.4290v1

J. Chem. Phys. 130, 234116 (2009)

Physics

Condensed Matter

Statistical Mechanics

11 pages, 9 figures

Scientific paper

10.1063/1.3155084

A main goal of single-molecule experiments is to evaluate equilibrium free energy differences by applying fluctuation relations to repeated work measurements along irreversible processes. We quantify the error that is made in a free energy estimate by means of the Jarzynski equality when the accumulated work expended on the whole system (including the instrument) is erroneously replaced by the work transferred to the subsystem consisting of the sole molecular construct. We find that the error may be as large as 100%, depending on the number of experiments and on the bandwidth of the data acquisition apparatus. Our theoretical estimate is validated by numerical simulations and pulling experiments on DNA hairpins using optical tweezers.

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