Applied Models in Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics

The research concerns the study of applied models in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. The emerging of irreversible behaviour from time-reversible microscopic dynamics depicted by the thermodynamic description, is commonly referred as the paradox of irreversibility. The recent results obtained by Evans and Searls, namely the Fluctuation-Relations (FRs) for the dissipation function, helped to shed light on the mechanism leading to the break in the time-simmetry, and opened new perspectives on the description of non-equilibrium systems. Deterministic dynamical systems such as the multibaker map or Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations are useful models which may stress some of the crucial conditions which allow to derive irrevesibility from reversible dynamics. Furthermore, in this framework, the dissipation function plays a fundamental role in describing the relaxation process of pertubated systems to equilibrium, which represents a fundamental issue in the field from the foundations of the kinetic theory