ABSTRACT
With the advances of nanoscopic techniques, it is possible to monitor systems on length scales down to nanometers, and at timescales below microseconds. At these distances and timescales, thermal uctuations cannot be ignored. Macroscopic objects typically contain on the order of 1023 entities, and uctuations around the average value are neglectable. But, when observing on the nanometer level, one typically observes a
single entity, e.g., a single functioning biological molecule with a high temporal resolution, and uctuations are signi cant. If the nano-technique in addition exerts a force on the system studied, it is likely that the system is evolving through a nonequilibrium process with a corresponding energy dissipation.
