Pierre Gaspard: "Out-of-equilibrium nanosystems: Principles and applications"
The function of nanodevices
is often associated with their nonequilibrium properties such as
electric conductance, reaction rates in catalysis, or energy
transduction in thermoelectric converters or molecular motors. These
properties are formulated in terms of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and
the response relations between the rates and the affinities. In
nanodevices, the nonlinear-response properties are no longer negligible
in contrast to what happens at the macroscale. Moreover, thermal and
molecular fluctuations become major features of the description of
nanosystems. Recent advances and notably the fluctuation theorem
provide a framework to understand how directionality emerges out of
equilibrium, allowing information processing at the nanoscale as it is
the case in biological systems.