MPI Campus Seminar: Asymmetries in thermal relaxation

It is common experience that systems tend to relax towards equilibrium, and this is especially true for thermal relaxation phenomena. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that this relaxation only depends on the distance from the equilibrium state. However these laws break down when fluctuations drive the evolution of the system (e.g. at the nanoscale level). In this talk I will show how in this case the relaxation depends also on the direction of the displacement from equilibrium and I will comment on the physical origin of this phenomenon.