Thermodynamic bounds on the statistics of first-passage times and extreme values of stochastic processes
Izaak Neri (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Allemagne)
Stochastic thermodynamics generalizes concepts from thermodynamics, and makes them useful to study mesoscopic systems driven far from thermal equilibrium, such as, optically driven colloidal particles, noisy processes in cell biology or microelectronic devices. In mesoscopic systems thermodynamic observables — such as, entropy production, heat and mesoscopic currents —
are fluctuating quantities, and stochastic thermodynamics characterizes universal properties of these fluctuating quantities. Established results are the fluctuation relations and the thermodynamic uncertainty relations, which express universal properties of fluctuations of stochastic currents at a fixed time. In this talk I will present thermodynamic bounds for the statistics of first-passage times and extreme values of stochastic currents, which are fluctuating properties of trajectories of stochastic currents. Some interesting results are: a bound for the mean first-passage time of current variables in terms of the dissipation rate, a fluctuation theorem for first-passage times of entropy production, and a universal bound on the supremum statistics of the heat absorbed by a nonequilibrium system. These results will be illustrated on examples of physical processes, such as, the dynamics a molecular motor and charge transport in microelectronic devices.