The Statistical Mechanics of Irreversible Phenomena

by Pierre Gaspard

Overview

This book provides a comprehensive and self-contained overview of recent progress in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, in particular, the discovery of fluctuation relations and other time-reversal symmetry relations. The significance of these advances is that nonequilibrium statistical physics is no longer restricted to the linear regimes close to equilibrium, but extends to fully nonlinear regimes. These important new results have inspired the development of a unifying framework for describing both the microscopic dynamics of collections of particles, and the macroscopic hydrodynamics and thermodynamics of matter itself. The book discusses the significance of this theoretical framework in relation to a broad range of nonequilibrium processes, from the nanoscale to the macroscale, and is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in statistical physics, theoretical chemistry and biological physics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108473729
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/28/2022
Pages:	450
Product dimensions:	6.89(w) x 9.84(h) x 1.57(d)

About the Author

Pierre Gaspard is a Professor in Physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems. He is the author of the book, Chaos, Scattering and Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and has published over 200 related papers in the fields of statistical physics, nonlinear physics and chemical physics.

Table of Contents

1. Thermodynamics; 2. Statistical mechanics; 3. Hydrodynamics; 4. Stochastic processes; 5. Fluctuation relations for energy and particle fluxes; 6. Path probabilities, temporal disorder, and irreversibility; 7. Driven Brownian particles and related systems; 8. Effusion processes; 9. Processes in dilute and rarefied gases; 10. Fluctuating chemohydrodynamics; 11. Reactions; 12. Active processes; 13. Transport in Hamiltonian dynamical models; 14. Quantum statistical mechanics; 15. Transport in open quantum systems; Appendix A; Appendix B; Appendix C; Appendix D; Appendix E; Appendix F; References: Index.

Editorial Reviews

‘… convincingly demonstrates that fluctuation relations allow us to study nonequilibrium systems beyond the linear irreversible regime. A comprehensive and self- contained overview of a considerable amount of recent progress in the field, it is one of the best sources available to learn about the state of the art in nonlinear dynamics. I have no doubt that graduate students and researchers will enjoy reading it.’ Patrick Ilg, Physics Today

From the Publisher