Low thermal fluctuations in a system heated out of equilibrium

Abstract

We study the mechanical fluctuations of a micrometer sized silicon cantilever subjected to a strong heat flow, thus having a highly non-uniform local temperature. In this non-equilibrium steady state, we show that fluctuations are equivalent to the thermal noise of a cantilever at equilibrium around room temperature, while its mean local temperature is several hundred of degrees higher. Changing the mechanical dissipation by adding a coating to the cantilever, we recover the expected rise of fluctuations with the mean temperature. Our work demonstrates that inhomogeneous dissipation mechanisms can decouple the amplitude of thermal fluctuations from the average temperature. This property could be useful to understand out-of-equilibrium fluctuating systems, or to engineer low noise instruments.

References in corpus (7)

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• Extended equipartition in a mechanical system subject to a heat flow: the case of localised dissipation
• Temperature mediated back-action in micro- and nanomechanical resonators
• Linking fluctuation and dissipation in spatially extended out-of-equilibrium systems
• On the link between mechanics and thermal properties: mechanothermics
• Thermal response of a Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chain with Andersen thermostats