Temperature is not an observable in superstatistics

Abstract

Superstatistics (Physica A 322, 267-275, 2003) is a formalism that attempts to explain the presence of distributions other than the Boltzmann-Gibbs distributions in Nature, typically power-law behavior, for systems out of equilibrium such as fluids under turbulence, plasmas and gravitational systems. Superstatistics postulates that those systems are found in a superposition of canonical ensembles at different temperatures. The usual interpretation is one of local thermal equilibrium (LTE) in the sense of an inhomogeneous temperature distribution in different regions of space or instants of time. Here we show that, in order for superstatistics to be internally consistent, it is impossible to define a phase-space function or observable $B(p,q)$ corresponding one-to-one to the local value of $\beta =1/k_{B}T$. Temperature then belongs to a different class of observables than the energy, which has as a phase-space function the Hamiltonian $\mathcal{H}(p,q)$. An important consequence of our proof is that, in Superstatistics, the identification of temperature with the kinetic energy is limited to the expectation of $\beta$ and cannot be used to measure the different temperatures in LTE or its fluctuations.

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