The length of time's arrow

Details The length of time's arrow The length of time's arrow

2008-08-29

arxiv.org/abs/0809.0025v1

Phys.Rev.Lett.101:090602,2008

Physics

Condensed Matter

Statistical Mechanics

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.090602

An unresolved problem in physics is how the thermodynamic arrow of time arises from an underlying time reversible dynamics. We contribute to this issue by developing a measure of time-symmetry breaking, and by using the work fluctuation relations, we determine the time asymmetry of recent single molecule RNA unfolding experiments. We define time asymmetry as the Jensen-Shannon divergence between trajectory probability distributions of an experiment and its time-reversed conjugate. Among other interesting properties, the length of time's arrow bounds the average dissipation and determines the difficulty of accurately estimating free energy differences in nonequilibrium experiments.

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