Variational Principle in Langevin Processes

The recent work, Nemoto and Sasa [Phys. Rev. E, 83: 030105(R) (2011)], has shown that large deviations of the current characterizing a nonequilibrium system are obtained by observing the typical current for a modified system specified by a variational principle. In the present study, we will give a generalized version of the Nemoto-Sasa study by extracting a hidden mathematical structure from the fluctuation-response relation which is well-known in statistical mechanics. Here, the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence plays an essential role.