No Arabic abstract
We give a pedagogical introduction to a selection of recently discussed topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, concentrating mostly on formal structures and on general principles. Part I contains an overview of the formalism of lattice gases that we use to explain various symmetries and inequalities generally valid for nonequilibrium systems, including the fluctuation symmetry, Jarzynski equality, and the direction of currents. In Part II we concentrate on the macroscopic state and how entropy provides a bridge between microscopic dynamics and macroscopic irreversibility; included is a construction of quantum macroscopic states and a result on the equivalence of ensembles.
We study the exponential convergence to the stationary state for nonequilibrium Langevin dynamics, by a perturbative approach based on hypocoercive techniques developed for equilibrium Langevin dynamics. The Hamiltonian and overdamped limits (corresponding respectively to frictions going to zero or infinity) are carefully investigated. In particular, the maximal magnitude of admissible perturbations are quantified as a function of the friction. Numerical results based on a Galerkin discretization of the generator of the dynamics confirm the theoretical lower bounds on the spectral gap.
We present results on the ballistic and diffusive behavior of the Langevin dynamics in a periodic potential that is driven away from equilibrium by a space-time periodic driving force, extending some of the results obtained by Collet and Martinez. In the hyperbolic scaling, a nontrivial average velocity can be observed even if the external forcing vanishes in average. More surprisingly, an average velocity in the direction opposite to the forcing may develop at the linear response level -- a phenomenon called negative mobility. The diffusive limit of the non-equilibrium Langevin dynamics is also studied using the general methodology of central limit theorems for additive functionals of Markov processes. To apply this methodology, which is based on the study of appropriate Poisson equations, we extend recent results on pointwise estimates of the resolvent of the generator associated with the Langevin dynamics. Our theoretical results are illustrated by numerical simulations of a two-dimensional system.
We show that a quantum particle in $mathbb{R}^d$, for $d geq 1$, subject to a white-noise potential, moves super-ballistically in the sense that the mean square displacement $int |x|^2 langle rho(x,x,t) rangle ~dx$ grows like $t^{3}$ in any dimension. The white noise potential is Gaussian distributed with an arbitrary spatial correlation function and a delta correlation function in time. This is a known result in one dimension (see refs. Fischer, Leschke, Muller and Javannar, Kumar}. The energy of the system is also shown to increase linearly in time. We also prove that for the same white-noise potential model on the lattice $mathbb{Z}^d$, for $d geq 1$, the mean square displacement is diffusive growing like $t^{1}$. This behavior on the lattice is consistent with the diffusive behavior observed for similar models in the lattice $mathbb{Z}^d$ with a time-dependent Markovian potential (see ref. Kang, Schenker).
The thermodynamic properties of quantum heat engines are stochastic owing to the presence of thermal and quantum fluctuations. We here experimentally investigate the efficiency and nonequilibrium entropy production statistics of a spin-1/2 quantum Otto cycle. We first study the correlations between work and heat within a cycle by extracting their joint distribution for different driving times. We show that near perfect anticorrelation, corresponding to the tight-coupling condition, can be achieved. In this limit, the reconstructed efficiency distribution is peaked at the macroscopic efficiency and fluctuations are strongly suppressed. We further test the second law in the form of a joint fluctuation relation for work and heat. Our results characterize the statistical features of a small-scale thermal machine in the quantum domain and provide means to control them.
The probability distribution of a function of a subsystem conditioned on the value of the function of the whole, in the limit when the ratio of their values goes to zero, has a limit law: It equals the unconditioned marginal probability distribution weighted by an exponential factor whose exponent is uniquely determined by the condition. We apply this theorem to explain the canonical equilibrium ensemble of a system in contact with a heat reservoir. Since the theorem only requires analysis at the level of the function of the subsystem and reservoir, it is applicable even without the knowledge of the composition of the reservoir itself, which extends the applicability of the canonical ensemble. Furthermore, we generalize our theorem to a model with strong interaction that contributes an additional term to the exponent, which is beyond the typical case of approximately additive functions. This result is new in both physics and mathematics, as a theory for the Gibbs conditioning principle for strongly correlated systems. A corollary provides a precise formulation of what a temperature bath is in probabilistic term