title: Fluctuations of energy flux in a simple dissipative out-of-equilibrium system.
abstract: We report the statistical properties of the fluctuations of the energy flux in an electronic RC circuit driven with a stochastic voltage. The fluctuations of the power injected in the circuit are measured as a function of the damping rate and the forcing parameters. We show that its distribution exhibits a cusp close to zero and two asymmetric exponential tails, with the asymmetry being driven by the mean dissipation. This simple experiment allows one to capture the qualitative features of the energy flux distribution observed in more complex dissipative systems. We also show that the large fluctuations of injected power averaged on a time lag do not verify the fluctuation theorem even for long averaging time. This is in contrast to the findings of previous experiments due to their small range of explored fluctuation amplitude. The injected power in a system of N components either correlated or not is also studied to mimic systems with large number of particles, such as in a dilute granular gas.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, CNRS, 24, Rue Lhomond, 75 005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Claudio
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Falcón
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Falcon