1209.3961 (D. Nickelsen et al.)

Asymptotic work distributions in driven bistable systems    [PDF]

D. Nickelsen, A. Engel

The asymptotic tails of the probability distributions of thermodynamic quantities convey important information about the physics of nanoscopic systems driven out of equilibrium. We apply a recently proposed method to analytically determine the asymptotics of work distributions in Langevin systems to an one-dimensional model of single-molecule force spectroscopy. The results are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations, even in the centre of the distributions. We compare our findings with a recent proposal for an universal form of the asymptotics of work distributions in single-molecule experiments.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3961