Experimental test of a new equality: measuring heat dissipation in an optically driven colloidal system.
Measurement of energy dissipation in small nonequilibrium systems is generally a difficult task. Recently, Harada and Sasa [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 130602 (2005)] derived an equality relating the energy dissipation rate to experimentally accessible quantities in nonequilibrium steady states described by the Langevin equation. Here, we show an experimental test of this new relation in an optically driven colloidal system. We find that this equality is validated to a fairly good extent, thus the irreversible work of a small system is estimated from readily obtainable quantities.
Toyabe
Shoichi
S
Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo, Hongo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. shoichi@daisy.phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Jiang
Hong-Ren
HR
Nakamura
Takenobu
T
Murayama
Yoshihiro
Y
Sano
Masaki
M