Thermodynamics “beyond” local equilibrium
- *Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; and ‡Departament de Física Fonamental, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Diagonal 647, E-08028 Barcelona, Spain
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Communicated by Howard Reiss, University of California, Los Angeles, CA (received for review March 12, 2001)
Abstract
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics has shown its applicability in a wide variety of different situations pertaining to fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. As successful as it is, however, its current formulation considers only systems close to equilibrium, those satisfying the so-called local equilibrium hypothesis. Here we show that diffusion processes that occur far away from equilibrium can be viewed as at local equilibrium in a space that includes all the relevant variables in addition to the spatial coordinate. In this way, nonequilibrium thermodynamics can be used and the difficulties and ambiguities associated with the lack of a thermodynamic description disappear. We analyze explicitly the inertial effects in diffusion and outline how the main ideas can be applied to other situations.
Footnotes
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↵ † To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: vilar{at}princeton.edu.
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This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
- Copyright © 2001, The National Academy of Sciences
