title: Free energy surfaces from nonequilibrium processes without work measurement.
abstract: Recent developments in statistical mechanics have allowed the estimation of equilibrium free energies from the statistics of work measurements during processes that drive the system out of equilibrium. Here a different class of processes is considered, wherein the system is prepared and released from a nonequilibrium state, and no external work is involved during its observation. For such "clamp-and-release" processes, a simple strategy for the estimation of equilibrium free energies is offered. The method is illustrated with numerical simulations and analyzed in the context of tethered single-molecule experiments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA. artur@brown.edu
authors.forename: Artur B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Adib