Work and heat distributions for a Brownian particle subjected to an oscillatory drive

Abstract: Using the Onsager-Machlup functional integral approach, we obtain the work distribution function and the distribution of the dissipated heat of a Brownian particle subjected to a confining harmonic potential and an oscillatory driving force. In the long time limit, the width of the work distribution function initially increases with the frequency of the driving force and finally saturates to a fixed value for large values of the angular frequency. Using the results from the work distribution part, we next obtain the distribution of the dissipated heat for the equilibrium initial condition. Using the method of steepest descent, we obtain a Gaussian distribution for small fluctuations in the large time limit. The distribution function, for a fixed time has been obtained numerically. It is shown that the heat distribution, in general, does not satisfy the transient fluctuation theorem.