According to conventional wisdom, a macroscopic system placed in an environment with a different temperature relaxes to the temperature of the surroundings, mediated by the flow of heat that is set only by the instantaneous temperature difference. However, when rapid changes in temperature push a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium, thermal relaxation becomes asymmetric. That is, under...
Stochastic Thermodynamics usually investigates and describes Markovian systems where memory is absent. A typical example is Brownian Motion, where dynamics are overdamped with a delta-correlated noise term. Yet this Markovian hypothesis is very strong, and only valid for a limited range of time and length scales. More generally, a wide range of physical systems exhibit memory with finite...
Optimal protocols have been a subject of intense research in stochastic thermodynamics due to their importance for the understanding of biological processes and the operation of heat engines at the micro- and nanoscale. In this study, we experimentally investigate protocols to transport a Brownian particle over a given distance within a finite time using an optical trap that minimize the work...
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