The Mesoscopic Dynamics of Thermodynamic Systems

David Reguera received his B.S. degree in Physics in 1998 and his Ph.D. in 2001, both from the University of Barcelona, Spain. His thesis about nucleation phenomena was recognized by the “Ilya Prigogine Prize 2003” as the best European thesis in the field of thermodynamics. After completion of his Ph.D., he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. H. Reiss. In 2004, his research work on fluctuations in nanosystems was recognized by the “Amgen Award”. Since 2004, he is a “Ramón y Cajal” Researcher at the University of Barcelona. His current research interest focuses on biophysics of viruses, nucleation phenomena, and nonequilibrium statistical thermodynamics of nanosystems.

Miguel Rubí was born in Barcelona. He received the B. S. degree in physics from the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona in 1975 and his PhD degree in theoretical physics from the same university in 1979. In his research career, he has carried out theoretical investigation on nonequilibrium statistical physics and soft condensed matter. Rubí has been Sandoval Vallarta Professor of the UAM, Mexico and Onsager Professor of the university of Trondheim. In 2003, he was awarded the Onsager medal and an Alexander von Humboldt Prize for his contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics and to the theory of stochastic processes. Miguel Rubí, is Professor of condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona.

Jose Vilar was born in Barcelona, Spain. He attended the University of Barcelona, where he received a B.S. in Physics in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1998. The subject of his graduate research was the constructive role of non-equilibrium fluctuations in systems with temporal and spatial dependence. After completion of his Ph.D., he moved to the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where he redirected his research towards the biophysical basis of cellular behavior, and then to The Rockefeller University. Since 2004, he is an Assistant Member of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, where he heads the Laboratory for Integrative Biological Modeling. He is also an Assistant Professor of Physiology, Biophysics, and Systems Biology at Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University. His current research focuses on the mesoscopic behavior of gene regulatory and signal transduction networks in cells, with emphasis on the molecular mechanisms underlying the development and progression of cancer.

Concepts of everyday use such as energy, heat, and temperature have acquired a precise meaning after the development of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics provides the basis for understanding how heat and work are related and the general rules that the macroscopic properties of systems at equilibrium follow. Outside equilibrium and away from macroscopic regimes, most of those rules cannot be applied directly. Here we present recent developments that extend the applicability of thermodynamic concepts deep into mesoscopic and irreversible regimes. We show how the probabilistic interpretation of thermodynamics together with probability conservation laws can be used to obtain Fokker−Planck equations for the relevant degrees of freedom. This approach provides a systematic method to obtain the stochastic dynamics of a system directly from its equilibrium properties. A wide variety of situations can be studied in this way, including many that were thought to be out of reach of thermodynamic theories, such as nonlinear transport in the presence of potential barriers, activated processes, slow relaxation phenomena, and basic processes in biomolecules, such as translocation and stretching.