A generalized detailed balance relation

Abstract

Given a system $M$ in a thermal bath we obtain a generalized detailed balance relation for the ratio $r={\pi }_{\tau }(K\to J)/{\pi }_{\tau }(J\to K)$ of the transition probabilities $M:J\to K$ and $M:K\to J$ in time $\tau$. We assume an active bath, containing solute molecules in metastable states. These molecules may react with $M$ and the transition $J\to K$ occurs through different channels $\alpha$ involving different reactions with the bath. We find that $r=\sum p^{\alpha }{r}^{\alpha }$, where $p^{\alpha }$ is the probability that channel $\alpha$ occurs, and $r^{\alpha }$ depends on the amount of heat (more precisely enthalpy) released to the bath in channel $\alpha$.

12 pages revised version Section 3 rewritten results unchanged

References in corpus (1)

• Statistical Physics of Self-Replication

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Thermodynamics of switching in multistable non-equilibrium systems