The study of stochastic systems has received considerable interest over the years. Their dynamics can describe many equilibrium and nonequilibrium fluctuating systems. At the same time, nonequilibrium constraints interact with the time evolution in various ways. Here we review the dynamics of stochastic systems from the viewpoint of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. We explore the effect of external thermodynamic forces on the possible dynamical regimes and show that the time evolution can become intrinsically different under nonequilibrium conditions. For example, nonequilibrium systems with real dynamical components are similar to equilibrium ones when their state space dimension N < 5, but this equivalence is lost in higher dimensions. Out of equilibrium systems thus present new dynamical behaviors with respect to their equilibrium counterpart. We also study the dynamical modes of generalized, non-stochastic evolution operators such as those arising in counting statistics.
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