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arXiv · 2101.06394

The metastable Mpemba effect corresponds to a non-monotonic temperature dependence of extractable work

Raphaël Chétrite·Avinash Kumar·John Bechhoefer
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Abstract

The Mpemba effect refers to systems whose thermal relaxation time is a non-monotonic function of the initial temperature. Thus, a system that is initially hot cools to a bath temperature more quickly than the same system, initially warm. In the special case where the system dynamics can be described by a double-well potential with metastable and stable states, dynamics occurs in two stages: a fast relaxation to local equilibrium followed by a slow equilibration of populations in each coarse-grained state. We have recently observed the Mpemba effect experimentally in such a setting, for a colloidal particle immersed in water. Here, we show that this metastable Mpemba effect arises from a non-monotonic temperature dependence of the maximum amount of work that can be extracted from the local-equilibrium state at the end of Stage 1.

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BibTeXRIS

Raphaël Chétrite, Avinash Kumar, John Bechhoefer. 2021-01-16. The metastable Mpemba effect corresponds to a non-monotonic temperature dependence of extractable work. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2021.654271

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