Illustrative example of the relationship between dissipation and relative entropy.

Kawai, Parrondo, and Van den Broeck [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 080602 (2007)] have recently established a quantitative relationship between dissipated work and a microscopic, information-theoretic measure of irreversibility. We illustrate this result using the exactly solvable system of a Brownian particle in a dragged harmonic trap.

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