SP Seminar @ICTP Stasi Room Tuesday 12 December at 11:00 - M. POLETTINI

[CM Section]

Joint ICTP/SISSA Statistical Physics Seminar
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Tuesday 12 December at 11:00 a.m.
Luigi Stasi Seminar Room, first floor, ICTP Leonardo building
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Speaker:
Matteo POLETTINI(Univ. du Luxembourgh, Unit Physique et Materiaux)

Title:
Effective Thermodynamics for a marginal Observer

Abstract:
Thermodynamics often presumes that the observer has a macroscopically 
complete
information about the system she or he deals with: no parasitic current, 
exact evaluation
of the forces needed to drive the system out of equilibrium. However, 
most often the
observer only measures marginal information. How is she or he to make 
consistent
thermodynamic claims? Disregarding sources of dissipation might lead to 
bold claims,
such as the possibility of perpetuum mobile. We show that it is 
nevertheless possible
to produce an effective description that does not dispense with the 
fundamentals of
thermodynamics: the 2nd Law, the Fluctuation-Dissipation paradigm, and 
the more
recent and encompassing Fluctuation Theorem. We base our theory on the 
theory of
the stochastic thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems, introducing a 
class of "marginally
time-reversed" Markovian generators that have interesting mathematical 
and physical
properties.**