Equation 8 · Part 1 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Stochastic Thermodynamics and Complex Systems
Symbol W
What this part means
W is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Its job in the formula
W is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol W→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The next structural advance did not concern the demon at all; it concerned a much older and more general problem — how to extract equilibrium information from a process driven arbitrarily far from equilibrium. In 1997, Christopher Jarzynski published “Nonequilibrium Equality for Free Energy Differences” in Physical Review Letters [ 3 ] . The Jarzynski equality states that if a system is driven from one equilibrium state to another along some protocol, performing a fluctuating amount of work W on each repetition, the equilibrium free energy difference F between the two states can be recovered exactly from an exponential average over the work distribution:
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A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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