C. Jarzynski (1997), Physical Review Letters 78(14), 2690–2693 — DOI-10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.2690 (preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9610209, 30 October 1996)
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 with the critics of Prigogine’s extremum principles, the maximum-entropy-production literature and the fluctuation theorems, at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of dissipative structures. No anthology topic can hold a result in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics read for itself, and the anthology does not hold it.
NOTE-417 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. It is the founding statement of one of the two exact far-from-equilibrium relations every later fluctuation-theorem paper builds on. Crooks (LIT-522) derived it again from an entropy-production fluctuation theorem for stochastic dynamics, and Seifert’s review (LIT-523) places it as the integral fluctuation theorem for dissipated work. The record already reads its equation once, in the quantum thermodynamics review LIT-010, which derives the classical Jarzynski and Crooks relations in full and notes that Crooks needs detailed balance with the bath.
Its bearing on the record’s stochastic-thermodynamics-of-computation line is background, not support. Still et al. (LIT-327) cite it as the relation that assumes a known protocol, which is exactly the assumption they drop. THEORY-026 does not rest on it: its identity is an ensemble average for a discrete Markov chain and uses no work fluctuation relation. The paper is also the first place the record can point for “dissipated work” as W − ΔF with ΔF the equilibrium free energy. LIT-327’s dissipation subtracts a nonequilibrium free energy instead, and NOTE-417 says how the two differ.
It has nothing to say about dissipative structures in Prigogine’s sense: it concerns finite systems driven between equilibrium states, not steady states held far from equilibrium.