Thermodynamic potentials for non-equilibrium systems

The notion of non-equilibrium potential for systems far from equilibrium is reviewed and the relation to the reversed process is examined. The potential is constructed in the neighborhood of the homogeneous attractors for a non-variational extended system, namely the subcritical complex Ginzburg–Landau equation. This construction is the second known example of a Lyapunov functional for a non-variational system.