Current with "wrong" sign and phase transitions

Abstract

We prove that under certain conditions, phase separation is enough to sustain a regime in which current flows along the concentration gradient, a phenomenon which is known in the literature as \textit{uphill diffusion}. The model we consider here is a version of that proposed in [G. B. Giacomin, J. L. Lebowitz, Phase segregation dynamics in particle system with long range interactions, Journal of Statistical Physics 87(1) (1997): 37-61], which is the continuous mesoscopic limit of a $1d$ discrete Ising chain with a Kac potential. The magnetization profile lies in the interval $\left[-{\epsilon }^{-1},{\epsilon }^{-1}\right]$, $\epsilon >0$, staying in contact at the boundaries with infinite reservoirs of fixed magnetization $\pm \mu$, $\mu \in (m^{\ast }\left(\beta \right),1)$, where $m^{\ast }\left(\beta \right)=\sqrt{1-1/\beta }$, $\beta >1$ representing the inverse temperature. At last, an external field of Heaviside-type of intensity $\kappa >0$ is introduced. According to the axiomatic non-equilibrium theory, we derive from the mesoscopic free energy functional the corresponding stationary equation and prove the existence of a solution, which is antisymmetric with respect to the origin and discontinuous in $x=0$, provided $\epsilon$ is small enough. When $\mu$ is metastable, the current is positive and bounded from below by a positive constant independent of $\kappa$, this meaning that both phase transition as well as external field contributes to uphill diffusion, which is a regime that actually survives when the external bias is removed.