Influence of flux balance on the generalized chemical potential in mass transport models

Abstract

In equilibrium systems, the conservation of the number of particles (or mass) leads to the equalization of the chemical potential throughout the system. Using a non-equilibrium generalization of the notion of chemical potential, we investigate the influence of disorder and of the balance of mass fluxes on the generalized chemical potential in the framework of stochastic mass transport models. We focus specifically on the issue of local mesurements of the chemical potential. We find that while local dynamical disorder does not affect the measurement process, the presence of large-scale geometrical heterogeneities (branching geometry) leads to unequal local measurement results in different points of the system. We interpret these results in terms of mass flux balance, and argue that the conditions for the global definition of the chemical potential still hold, but that local measurements fail to capture the global theoretical value.

14 pages, 7 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Large deviations and chemical potential in bulk-driven systems in contact
• Thermodynamic Theory of Phase Transitions in Driven Lattice Gases
• Nonequilibrium chemical potentials of steady-state lattice gas models in contact: A large-deviations approach
• Current loops and fluctuations in the zero-range process on a diamond lattice