Test of the Jarzynski and Crooks Fluctuation Relations in an Electronic System

Abstract

Recent progress on micro-and nanometer-scale manipulation has opened the possibility to probe systems small enough that thermal fluctuations of energy and coordinate variables can be significant compared with their mean behavior. We present an experimental study of nonequilibrium thermodynamics in a classical two-state system, namely, a metallic single-electron box. We have measured with high statistical accuracy the distribution of dissipated energy as single electrons are transferred between the box electrodes. The obtained distributions obey Jarzynski and Crooks fluctuation relations. A comprehensive microscopic theory exists for the system, enabling the experimental distributions to be reproduced without fitting parameters.

Towards quantum thermodynamics in electronic circuits

“…A basic experiment on this type of system involves repeated ramps of the voltage from, say, n g = 0 to n g = 1 [28]. The dissipation under non-equilibrium driving is associated with tunneling events between the two islands that take place away from the energy degeneracy n g = 1/2, that is, with non-zero ∆µ = 2E C (n g − 1/2).…”

Heat due to system-reservoir correlations in thermal equilibrium

“…Recently, the subjects of heat and work and their distributions in the quantum regime have received considerable attention [1,2] with measurement protocols proposed and implemented for solid state devices [3][4][5]. Classical thermodynamics considers a system of interest immersed in a much larger heat bath [6], where the latter one ensures thermal equilibration of the system, but can be ignored otherwise.…”

“…While an instantaneous switching-on of system-bath interactions is typically difficult to realize experimentally, it allows us, in a first step, to quantify the impact of these correlations for various types of reservoirs. We derive general expressions and discuss specific results for systems of possible experimental interest [3][4][5]16,20], namely, two-level systems and harmonic modes. It turns out that even in the weak coupling regime, this heat flow is substantial at low temperatures and may become comparable to typical predictions for the work based on conventional weak coupling approaches [3,[17][18][19].…”

Fluctuation theorem for heat transport probed by a thermal probe electrode

“…Here we have introduced the parameter x, which measures the asymmetry in the inverse-temperature drop between the left and right electrodes, (36) for the CGF of the three-terminal setup satisfies the FT,…”