Asymptotic work distributions in driven bistable systems

Abstract

The asymptotic tails of the probability distributions of thermodynamic quantities convey important information about the physics of nanoscopic systems driven out of equilibrium. We apply a recently proposed method to analytically determine the asymptotics of work distributions in Langevin systems to an one-dimensional model of single-molecule force spectroscopy. The results are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations, even in the centre of the distributions. We compare our findings with a recent proposal for an universal form of the asymptotics of work distributions in single-molecule experiments.

10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Physica Scripta