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Organizers: Timothy Berkelbach (Princeton), David Limmer (Princeton), Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan (U Chicago), Weinan E (Princeton)
The past 15 years have seen unprecedented progress in the understanding of general nonequilibrium systems. Exact relationships valid arbitrarily far from equilibrium have been discovered, admitting the extension of concepts from thermodynamics beyond the linear response regime. These results generically refer to distribution functions of thermodynamic quantities like heat, work and entropy and are increasingly important for nanoscale systems and devices. Recently, it has become clear that the theoretical infrastructure that this progress has been largely built upon is “large deviation theory,” or the branch of probability concerned with exponentially rare fluctuations. This workshop will bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to exchange new ideas on the understanding and application of large deviation theory in statistical physics.