Asymptotic work distributions in driven bistable systems
arXiv:1209.3961 · doi:10.1088/0031-8949/86/05/058503
Abstract
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.
10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Physica Scripta
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