arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C. Maes.
We show for a large class of interacting particle systems that whenever the stationary measure is not reversible for the dynamics, then the mean entropy production in the steady state is strictly positive. This extends to the thermodynamic limit the equivalence between microscopic reversibility and zero mean entropy production: time-reversal invariance cannot be spontaneously broken.
It is argued that a Gibbsian formula for the space-time distribution of microscopic trajectories of a nonequilibrium system provides a unifying framework for recent results on the fluctuations of the entropy production. The variable entropy production is naturally expressed as the time-reversal symmetry breaking part of the space-time action functional. Its mean is always positive. This is both supported by a Boltzmann type analysis by counting the change in phase space extension corresponding to the macrostate as by various examples of nonequilibrium models. As the Gibbsian set-up allows for non-Markovian dynamics, we also get a local fluctuation theorem for the entropy production in globally Markovian models. In order to study the response of the system to perturbations, we can apply the standard Gibbs formalism.
We point out that the "disorder potential" employed in the grand ensemble approach is ill-defined in considerable generality.
This is a (long) survey about applications of percolation theory in equilibrium statistical mechanics. The chapters are as follows: 1. Introduction 2. Equilibrium phases 3. Some models 4. Coupling and stochastic domination 5. Percolation 6. Random-cluster representations 7. Uniqueness and exponential mixing from non-percolation 8. Phase transition and percolation 9. Random interactions 10. Continuum models
Considering the standard abelian sandpile model in one dimension, we construct an infinite volume Markov process corresponding to its thermodynamic (infinite volume) limit. The main difficulty we overcome is the strong non-locality of the dynamics. However, using similar ideas as in recent extensions of the standard Gibbs formalism for lattice spin systems, we can identify a set of `good' configurations on which the dynamics is effectively local. We prove that every configuration converges in a finite time to the unique invariant measure.
We discuss the status of recent Gibbsian descriptions of the restriction (projection) of the Ising phases to a layer. We concentrate on the projection of the two-dimensional low temperature Ising phases for which we prove a variational principle.