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Abstract:
We present the conceptual and technical background required to describe and understand the correlations and fluctuations of the empirical density and current of steady-state diffusion processes on all time scales — observables central to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics on the level of individual trajectories. We focus on the important and non-trivial effect of a spatial coarse graining. Making use of a generalized time-reversal symmetry we provide deeper insight about the physical meaning of fluctuations of the coarse-grained empirical density and current, and explain
why a systematic variation of the coarse-graining scale offers an efficient method to infer bounds on a system’s dissipation. Moreover, we discuss emerging symmetries in the statistics of the empirical density and current, and the statistics in the large deviations regime. More broadly our work promotes the application of stochastic calculus as a powerful direct alternative to Feynman-Kac theory and path-integral methods.
