No Arabic abstract
We analyse the emergence of Kovacs-like memory effects in athermal systems within the linear response regime. This is done by starting from both the master equation for the probability distribution and the equations for the physically relevant moments. The general results are applied to a general class of models with conserved momentum and non-conserved energy. Our theoretical predictions, obtained within the first Sonine approximation, show an excellent agreement with the numerical results.
We analyse the linear response properties of the uniformly heated granular gas. The intensity of the stochastic driving fixes the value of the granular temperature in the non-equilibrium steady state reached by the system. Here, we investigate two specific situations. First, we look into the ``direct relaxation of the system after a single (small) jump of the driving intensity. This study is carried out by two different methods. Not only do we linearise the evolution equations around the steady state, but also derive generalised out-of-equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation relations for the relevant response functions. Second, we investigate the behaviour of the system in a more complex experiment, specifically a Kovacs-like protocol with two jumps in the driving. The emergence of anomalous Kovacs response is explained in terms of the properties of the direct relaxation function: it is the second mode changing sign at the critical value of the inelasticity that demarcates anomalous from normal behaviour. The analytical results are compared with numerical simulations of the kinetic equation, and a good agreement is found.
We determine the nonlocal stress autocorrelation tensor in an homogeneous and isotropic system of interacting Brownian particles starting from the Smoluchowski equation of the configurational probability density. In order to relate stresses to particle displacements as appropriate in viscoelastic states, we go beyond the usual hydrodynamic description obtained in the Zwanzig-Mori projection operator formalism by introducing the proper irreducible dynamics following Cichocki and Hess, and Kawasaki. Differently from these authors, we include transverse contributions as well. This recovers the expression for the stress autocorrelation including the elastic terms in solid states as found for Newtonian and Langevin systems, in case that those are evaluated in the overdamped limit. Finally, we argue that the found memory function reduces to the shear and bulk viscosity in the hydrodynamic limit of smooth and slow fluctuations and derive the corresponding hydrodynamic equations.
Athermal systems across a large range of length scales, ranging from foams and granular bead packings to crumpled metallic sheets, exhibit slow stress relaxation when compressed. Experimentally they show a non-monotonic stress response when decompressed somewhat after an initial compression, i.e. under a two-step, Kovacs-like protocol. It turns out that from this response one can tell the age of the system, suggesting an interpretation as a memory effect. In this work we use a model of an athermal jammed solid, specifically a binary mixture of soft harmonic spheres, to explore this phenomenon through in-silico experiments. Using extensive simulations under conditions analogous to those in experiment, we observe identical phenomenology in the stress response under a two--step protocol. Our model system also recovers the behaviour under a more recently studied three-step protocol, which consists of a compression followed by a decompression and then a final compression. We show that the observed response in both two-step and three-step protocols can be understood using Linear Response Theory. In particular, a linear scaling with age for the two-step protocol arises generically for slow linear responses with power law or logarithmic decay and does not in itself point to any underlying aging dynamics.
The Kovacs effect is a remarkable feature of the ageing dynamics of glass forming liquids near the glass transition temperature. It consists in a non-monotonous evolution of the volume/enthalpy after a succession of two abrupt temperature changes: first from a high initial temperature $T_i$ to a much lower annealing temperature $T_a$ followed by a smaller second jump back to a slightly higher final temperature $T_f$. The second change is performed when the instantaneous value of the volume/enthalpy coincides with the equilibrium one at the final temperature at $t_a$. While this protocol might be expected to yield equilibrium dynamics right after the second temperature change, one observes the so-called Kovacs hump in glassy systems. In this paper we apply such thermal protocol to the Distinguishable Particles Lattice Model (DPLM) for a wide range of fragility of the system. We study the Kovacs hump based on energy relaxation and all main experimental features are captured. Results are compared to general predictions based on a master equation approach in the linear response limit. We trace the origin of the Kovacs hump to the non-equilibrium nature of the probability distribution of particle interaction energies after the annealing and find that its difference with respect to the final equilibrium distribution is non-vanishing with two isolated zeros. This allows Kovacs condition of equilibrium total energy to be met out-of-equilibrium thus representing the memory content of the system. Furthermore, the hump is taller and occurs at a larger overlap with the system initial configuration for more fragile systems. The dynamics of a structural temperature for the mobile regions strongly depends on the glass fragility while for the immobile ones only a weak dependence is found.
To understand the non-exponential relaxation associated with solvation dynamics in the ionic liquid 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate, we study power spectra of the fluctuating Franck-Condon energy gap of a diatomic probe solute via molecular dynamics simulations. Results show 1/f dependence in a wide frequency range over 2 to 3 decades, indicating distributed relaxation times. We analyze the memory function and solvation time in the framework of the generalized Langevin equation using a simple model description for the power spectrum. It is found that the crossover frequency toward the white noise plateau is directly related to the time scale for the memory function and thus the solvation time. Specifically, the low crossover frequency observed in the ionic liquid leads to a slowly-decaying tail in its memory function and long solvation time. By contrast, acetonitrile characterized by a high crossover frequency and (near) absence of 1/f behavior in its power spectra shows fast relaxation of the memory function and single-exponential decay of solvation dynamics in the long-time regime.