The Statistical Mechanics of Irreversible Phenomena

A comprehensive overview of recent progress in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, including applications across a range of disciplines.

Pierre Gaspard (Author)

9781108473729, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 July 2022

450 pages
25 x 17.5 x 4 cm, 1.35 kg

This book provides a comprehensive and self-contained overview of recent progress in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, in particular, the discovery of fluctuation relations and other time-reversal symmetry relations. The significance of these advances is that nonequilibrium statistical physics is no longer restricted to the linear regimes close to equilibrium, but extends to fully nonlinear regimes. These important new results have inspired the development of a unifying framework for describing both the microscopic dynamics of collections of particles, and the macroscopic hydrodynamics and thermodynamics of matter itself. The book discusses the significance of this theoretical framework in relation to a broad range of nonequilibrium processes, from the nanoscale to the macroscale, and is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in statistical physics, theoretical chemistry and biological physics.

1. Thermodynamics
2. Statistical mechanics
3. Hydrodynamics
4. Stochastic processes
5. Fluctuation relations for energy and particle fluxes
6. Path probabilities, temporal disorder, and irreversibility
7. Driven Brownian particles and related systems
8. Effusion processes
9. Processes in dilute and rarefied gases
10. Fluctuating chemohydrodynamics
11. Reactions
12. Active processes
13. Transport in Hamiltonian dynamical models
14. Quantum statistical mechanics
15. Transport in open quantum systems
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E
Appendix F
References: Index.

Subject Areas: Physical chemistry [PNR], Statistical physics [PHS]