Single molecule experiments in biophysics: exploring the thermal behavior of nonequilibrium small systems
arXiv:cond-mat/0509606 · doi:10.1007/BF02704175
Abstract
Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and present some experimental results that show how the study of fluctuation theorems applied to biomolecules contributes to our understanding of the nonequilibrium thermal behavior of small systems.
Proceedings of the 22nd Statphys Conference 2004 (Bangalore,India). Invited contribution