Macroscopic Stochastic Thermodynamics

Understand

Starting at the mesoscopic level with a general formulation of stochastic thermodynamics in terms of Markov jump processes, we identify the scaling conditions that ensure the emergence of a (typically nonlinear) deterministic dynamics and an extensive thermodynamics at the macroscopic level.

• We then use large deviations theory to build a macroscopic fluctuation theory around this deterministic behavior, which we show preserves the fluctuation theorem.
• For many systems (e.g.
• chemical reaction networks, electronic circuits, Potts models), this theory does not coincide with Langevin-equation approaches (obtained by adding Gaussian white noise to the deterministic dynamics) which, if used, are thermodynamically inconsistent.