Date: 2 September 2026
Time: 16:00
Place: Seminar Room K202, Main Building, Yukawa Institute, Kyoto U.
The first and second laws of thermodynamics provide the basic principles for describing energy transformations and the emergence of the arrow of time in physical systems. Heat dissipation and entropy production, central quantities in these laws, are often difficult to quantify precisely in experiments because the associated energy exchanges are distributed over a vast number of typically inaccessible degrees of freedom in the environment. This is especially true at microscopic scales, where the relevant energy scales are often of the order of kB T, comparable to thermal fluctuations in the environment, and can lie several orders of magnitude below the sensitivity limits of state-of-the-art room-temperature calorimetry.
Recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical physics and data-driven inference provide new approaches for addressing these challenges. In this talk, I will first introduce recent theoretical results showing how nonequilibrium fluctuations can be exploited to quantify energy dissipation at scales inaccessible to conventional calorimetry. I will then demonstrate the practical applicability of these results by quantifying energy dissipation from experimental data in real physical systems, as well as estimating free-energy differences from nonequilibrium measurements in highly dissipative regimes where conventional fluctuation-theorem-based methods fail. I will conclude by discussing the remaining challenges and open questions.