Convection cells induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking

Abstract

Ubiquitous in nature, convection cells are a clear signature of systems out-of-equilibrium. Typically, they are driven by external forces, like gravity (in combination with temperature gradients) or shear. In this article, we show the existence of such cells in possibly the simplest system, one that involves only a temperature gradient. In particular, we consider an Ising lattice gas on a square lattice, in contact with two thermal reservoirs, one at infinite temperature and another at $T$. When this system settles into a non-equilibrium stationary state, many interesting phenomena exist. One of these is the emergence of convection cells, driven by spontaneous symmetry breaking when $T$ is set below the critical temperature.

published version, 2 figures, 5 pages

References in corpus (1)

• A possible classification of nonequilibrium steady states

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Flux and storage of energy in non-equilibrium, stationary states
• Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of a two-temperature Ising ring with conserved dynamics
• Two interacting Ising chains in relative motion
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• Formation of nonequilibrium modulated phases under local energy input
• Statistical early-warning indicators based on Auto-Regressive Moving-Average processes
• Energy flux near the junction of two Ising chains at different temperatures
• Steady-state properties of coupled hot and cold Ising chains