Getting More from Pushing Less: Negative Specific Heat and Conductivity in Non-equilibrium Steady States

Abstract

For students familiar with equilibrium statistical mechanics, the notion of a positive specific heat, being intimately related to the idea of stability, is both intuitively reasonable and mathematically provable. However, for system in non-equilibrium stationary states, coupled to more than one energy reservoir (e.g., thermal bath), negative specific heat is entirely possible. In this paper, we present a ``minimal'' system displaying this phenomenon. Being in contact with two thermal baths at different temperatures, the (internal) energy of this system may increase when a thermostat is turned down. In another context, a similar phenomenon is negative conductivity, where a current may increase by decreasing the drive (e.g., an external electric field). The counter-intuitive behavior in both processes may be described as `` getting more from pushing less.'' The crucial ingredients for this phenomenon and the elements needed for a ``minimal'' system are also presented.

14 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in American Journal of Physics

Cited by in corpus (55)

• Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics: From a paradigmatic model to biological transport
• Making Sense of the Legendre Transform
• Frenesy: time-symmetric dynamical activity in nonequilibria
• Observation of negative absolute resistance in a Josephson junction
• Microscopic theory for negative differential mobility in crowded environments
• Nonlinear response of inertial tracers in steady laminar flows: differential and absolute negative mobility
• Response theory: a trajectory-based approach
• The frenetic origin of negative differential response
• Tracer diffusion in crowded narrow channels. Topical review
• On the Minimal Length Uncertainty Relation and the Foundations of String Theory
• Nonlinear response and emerging nonequilibrium micro-structures for biased diffusion in confined crowding environments
• Twenty five years after KLS: A celebration of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics
• Driven tracer with absolute negative mobility
• Negative differential response in chemical reactions
• Nonequilibrium Response and Frenesy
• Anomalous nucleation far from equilibrium
• Role of trapping and crowding as sources of negative differential mobility
• Absolute negative mobility of an active tracer in a crowded environment
• Mobility transition in a dynamic environment
• Quantum Gravity, Dynamical Energy-Momentum Space and Vacuum Energy
• A lattice model of reduced jamming by barrier
• Energetics and performance of a microscopic heat engine based on exact calculations of work and heat distributions
• Entropy production and thermodynamic inference for stochastic microswimmers
• Spectral fingerprints of non-equilibrium dynamics: The case of a Brownian gyrator
• Lindblad dynamics of a quantum spherical spin
• Universality of biochemical feedback and its application to immune cells
• Flux and storage of energy in non-equilibrium, stationary states
• Anomalous force-velocity relation of driven inertial tracers in steady laminar flows
• Stronger selection can slow down evolution driven by recombination on a smooth fitness landscape
• A topological mechanism for robust and efficient global oscillations in biological networks
• Negative Differential Mobility in Interacting Particle Systems
• Nonequilibrium heat capacity
• Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of a two-temperature Ising ring with conserved dynamics
• Rings in Random Environments: Sensing Disorder Through Topology
• On the Origin of Time and the Universe
• Rate dependence of current and fluctuations in jump models with negative differential mobility
• Driven Widom-Rowlinson lattice gas
• Pushing run-and-tumble particles through a rugged channel
• Assisted exchange models in one dimension
• Cooling by heating in the quantum optics domain
• Paradoxical non-linear response of a Brownian particle
• The Big Bang as the Ultimate Traffic Jam
• Thermal Rectification and Negative Differential Thermal Resistance in a driven two segment classical Heisenberg chain
• Getting hotter by heating less: How driven granular materials dissipate energy in excess
• Death and resurrection of a current by disorder, interaction or activity
• Negative response to an excessive bias by a mixed population of voters
• Thermally driven classical Heisenberg chain with a spatially varying magnetic field: Thermal rectification and Negative differential thermal resistance
• Multi species asymmetric simple exclusion process with impurity activated flips
• Activity induced first order transition for the current in a disordered medium
• Negative mobility, sliding and delocalization for stochastic networks
• Slow dynamics in a driven two-lane particle system
• Negative specific heats: where Clausius and Boltzmann entropies separate
• Macroscopic charge segregation in driven polyelectrolyte solutions
• Negative Differential Heat Conductivity in a Harmonic Chain Coupled to a Particle Reservoir
• Negative differential mobility of weakly driven particles in models of glass formers