Free Energy Differences in Nonequilibrium Thermodynamic Processes

Systems which may be allowed to go out of equilibrium have been of interest recently. A quantity is formulated whose average over an ensemble of microscopic realizations of the process depends only on the initial and final states. This is so even though the system may not be in equilibrium during the process. A generalization to the case where the initial and final states are not equilibrium states is developed here. Quantum analogues of these relations are derived, and an indication of how this might be applied to study entropy increase in thermodynamics is presented.