arXiv subjects

Raphaël Chétrite

Publications and source records attributed to Raphaël Chétrite.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Mpemba effect likes to hit a wall

The original Mpemba effect refers to the idea that a macroscopic hot system cools faster than an initially colder one. In its microscopic and classical versions, the system is modeled as an overdamped particle in an external potential, and the corresponding Mpemba effect has been observed experimentally and explored theoretically. We establish that the existence of the one-dimensional Mpemba effect for a particle in an asymmetric polynomial double-well potential is driven solely by the presence of a hard wall, irrespective of the potential's double-well shape and metastability. The Mpemba effect disappears if we consider an infinitely large system. We then show that the underlying mechanism of the Mpemba effect is governed by the fine structure of the initial statistical population as it probes the tails of the potential, which also explains the Mpemba effect in single-well and symmetric double-well potentials.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2026

Predicting the conditions for observing the Mpemba effect

The Mpemba effect, a counterintuitive phenomenon where a hotter system relaxes faster than a colder one, has been widely observed in various nonequilibrium systems. Despite this progress, the fundamental structural features of the energy landscape required for its emergence remain a subject of debate. In this study, we investigate the conditions for the Mpemba effect within one-dimensional overdamped Langevin dynamics. We classify the potential landscapes based on the presence of single or double wells, their symmetry properties, and the existence of walls. We establish that the existence of the effect is primarily driven by the presence of boundaries, either hard or soft, rather than the specific internal structure of the potential landscape, such as metastability or the number of minima. By employing a spectral decomposition of the Fokker-Planck operator, we analyze the behavior of the first nontrivial eigenmode and demonstrate that its derivative acts as a Dirac delta peak in the low-temperature regime. This helps us elucidate the mechanism underlying the Mpemba effect: it appears as the interplay between this behavior and the initial population dynamics in a non-trivial way induced by the presence of the wall. Our analysis provides a unified classification across single- and double-well potentials, highlighting the crucial role of boundary conditions and asymmetry. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this framework allows for the engineering of potential landscapes capable of producing multistage Mpemba transitions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2021

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

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.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Periodically driven jump processes conditioned on large deviations

We study the fluctuations of systems modeled by Markov jump processes with periodic generators. We focus on observables defined through time-periodic functions of the system's states or transitions. Using large deviation theory, canonical biasing and generalized Doob transform, we characterize the asymptotic fluctuations of such observables after a large number of periods by obtaining the Markov process that produces them. We show that this process, called driven process, is the minimum under constraint of the large deviation function for occupation and jumps.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Gamma Convergence Approach For The Large Deviations Of The Density In Systems Of Interacting Diffusion Processes

We consider extended slow-fast systems of N interacting diffusions. The typical behavior of the empirical density is described by a nonlinear McKean-Vlasov equation depending on , the scaling parameter separating the time scale of the slow variable from the time scale of the fast variable. Its atypical behavior is encapsulated in a large N Large Deviation Principle (LDP) with a rate functional. We study the $Γ$-convergence of as $\rightarrow$ 0 and show it converges to the rate functional appearing in the Macroscopic Fluctuations Theory (MFT) for diffusive systems.

math.AP↗

arXiv2017

Direct measurement of nonequilibrium system entropy is consistent with Gibbs-Shannon form

Stochastic thermodynamics extends classical thermodynamics to small systems in contact with one or more heat baths. It can account for the effects of thermal fluctuations and describe systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. A basic assumption is that the expression for Shannon entropy is the appropriate description for the entropy of a nonequilibrium system in such a setting. Here, for the first time, we measure experimentally this function. Our system is a micron-scale colloidal particle in water, in a virtual double-well potential created by a feedback trap. We measure the work to erase a fraction of a bit of information and show that it is bounded by the Shannon entropy for a two-state system. Further, by measuring directly the reversibility of slow protocols, we can distinguish unambiguously between protocols that can and cannot reach the expected thermodynamic bounds.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2012

Inequalities generalizing the second law of thermodynamics for transitions between non-stationary states

We discuss the consequences of a variant of the Hatano-Sasa relation in which a non-stationary distribution is used in place of the usual stationary one. We first show that this non-stationary distribution is related to a difference of traffic between the direct and dual dynamics. With this formalism, we extend the definition of the adiabatic and non-adiabatic entropies introduced by M. Esposito and C. Van den Broeck in Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 090601 (2010) for the stationary case. We also obtain interesting second-law like inequalities for transitions between non-stationary states.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2011

Modified fluctuation-dissipation theorem near non-equilibrium states and applications to the Glauber-Ising chain

In this paper, we present a general derivation of a modified fluctuation-dissipation theorem (MFDT) valid near an arbitrary non-stationary state for a system obeying markovian dynamics. We show that the method to derive modified fluctuation-dissipation theorems near non-equilibrium stationary states used by J. Prost et al., PRL 103, 090601 (2009), is generalizable to non-stationary states. This result follows from both standard linear response theory and from a transient fluctuation theorem, analogous to the Hatano-Sasa relation. We show that this modified fluctuation-dissipation theorem can be interpreted at the trajectory level using the notion of stochastic trajectory entropy, in a way which is similar to what has been done recently in the case of MFDT near non-equilibrium steady states (NESS). We illustrate this framework with two solvable examples: the first example corresponds to a brownian particle in an harmonic trap submitted to a quench of temperature and to a time-dependent stiffness. The second example is a classic model of coarsening systems, namely the 1D Ising model with Glauber dynamics.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗