Christopher Jarzynski

Jarzynski established an equality relating the thermodynamic work performed on a system during an irreversible process, to a free energy difference between two equilibrium states of the system. This result contributed to conceptual foundations of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and engendered new fields of research in nanoscale science. This work has had practical applications in molecular scale experiments, and in the development of new algorithms for computational thermodynamics. He was awarded the 2005 Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.