After an insightful introductory part on recent developments in the thermodynamics of small systems, the author presents his contribution to a long-standing problem, namely the connection between irreversibility and dissipation. He develops a method based on recent results on fluctuation theorems that is able to estimate dissipation using only information acquired in a single, sufficiently long, trajectory of a stationary nonequilibrium process. This part ends with a remarkable application of the method to the analysis of biological data, in this case, the fluctuations of a hair bundle.
The third part studies the energetics of systems that undergo symmetry breaking transitions. These theoretical ideas lead to, among other things, an experimental realization of a Szilard engine using manipulated colloids.
This work has the potential for important applications ranging from the analysis of biological media to the design of novel artificial nano-machines.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Small-scale thermodynamics.- Irreversibility and dissipation.- Dissipation and kullback-leibler divergence.- Estimating the kullback-leibler divergence.- A case study: the flashing ratchet.- Application to biology: the ear hair bundle.- Experimental tests and applications of stochastic Thermodynamics.- Energetics of symmetry breaking.- Effective heating with random forces.- Conclusions.- Conclusions and outlook.