Structure of the optimal path to a fluctuation Tizón-Escamilla, Nicolás Hurtado, Pablo Ignacio Garrido, Pedro Luis Macroscopic fluctuations have become an essential tool to understand physics far from equilibrium due to the link between their statistics and nonequilibrium ensembles. The optimal path leading to a fluctuation encodes key information on this problem, shedding light on, e.g., the physics behind the enhanced probability of rare events out of equilibrium, the possibility of dynamic phase transitions, and new symmetries. This makes the understanding of the properties of these optimal paths a central issue. Here we derive a fundamental relation which strongly constrains the architecture of these optimal paths for general 𝑑-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusive systems, and implies a nontrivial structure for the dominant current vector fields. Interestingly, this general relation (which encompasses and explains previous results) makes manifest the spatiotemporal nonlocality of the current statistics and the associated optimal trajectories. 2025-01-30T09:22:25Z 2025-01-30T09:22:25Z 2017-03-09 journal article N. Tizón-Escamilla, P.I. Hurtado y P.L. Garrido. Structure of the optimal path to a fluctuation. Physical Review E 95 (3), 032119 (2017). https://hdl.handle.net/10481/101130 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.95.032119 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional American Physical Society (APS)