Abstract
The results of recent work of Kipnis, Olla, and Varadhan on the dynamic large deviations from a hydrodynamic limit for some interacting particle models are formally extended to a general hydrodynamic situation, including non-equilibrium steady states, as a fluctuation-dissipation hypothesis. The basic conjecture is that the exponent of decay in the probability of a large thermodynamic fluctuation is given by the dissipation of the force required to produce the fluctuation. It is shown that this hypothesis leads to a nonlinear version of Onsager-Machlup fluctuation theory that had previously been proposed by Graham. A direct consequence of the theory is a dynamic variational principle for the most probable thermodynamic history subject to imposed constraints (Onsager's principle of least dissipation). Following Graham, the theory leads also to a generalized potential, analogous to an equilibrium free energy, for the nonequilibrium steady state and an associated static variational principle. Finally, a formulation of nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamics is proposed in which the noise enters multiplicatively so as to reproduce the conjectured large-deviations theory on a formal analogy with the results of Freidlin and Wentzell for finite-dimensional systems.
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Eyink, G.L. Dissipation and large thermodynamic fluctuations. J Stat Phys 61, 533–572 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01027291
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01027291