Equality relationships, connecting the work performed in a non-equilibrium driven process of an isothermal system with the difference of equilibrium thermodynamic potentials, have been established by various authors since Jarzynski’s work of 1997, mostly based on a classical phase–space...

We consider in this paper, a few important issues in non-equilibrium work fluctuations and their relations to equilibrium free energies. First we show that the Jarzynski identity can be viewed as a cumulant expansion of work. For a switching process which is nearly quasistatic the work...