Exploring the Jarzynski Equality for the Harmonic Oscillator

TL;DR

This paper examines the validity of the Jarzynski equality for a harmonic oscillator, demonstrating it holds only for slow processes and highlighting misapplications of the Feynman-Kac formula in prior work.

Contribution

It clarifies the conditions under which the Jarzynski equality applies to harmonic oscillators and corrects previous misinterpretations involving the Feynman-Kac formula.

Findings

JE holds for slow, quasi-static processes

JE is invalid for rapid, non-equilibrium transitions

Feynman-Kac formula was misapplied in earlier studies

Abstract

Almost 25 years ago, Jarzynski published a paper in which it was asserted: the work done, W, in driving a system from state A to state B, characterized by the Helmholtz free energies FA and FB, satisfies an equality in which an average over an ensemble of measurements for W determines the difference in Free energy. Several features of this result require more detailed description, to be given in the text. The equality is significant and unexpected. So is the statement that the equality is independent of the rate of change from state A to state B. A few years ago, I had presented three papers in which the contraction of the description from full phase space to coordinate space only was made. This was motivated by the large difference in time scales for momenta relaxation and coordinate relaxation. The Jarzynski equality (JE) will be shown here to be correct only in the limit of slow processes. The proposed example is for a macromolecular harmonic oscillator with a Hooke's spring constant, k, that during the time interval linearly changes from k1 to k2. When performed slowly, we obtain JE in a form in which the free energy is related to the ratio of the k's. However, when the transition is performed more rapidly the equality is lost. Jarzynski has suggested to me that Hummer and Szabo have shown that JE follows directly from the Feynman-Kac formula. We show here that F-K does not reproduce the direct calculation executed in this paper and that it has been misapplied in earlier papers.