RT Journal Article
T1 Micro-reversibility and thermalization with collisional baths
A1 Ehrich, Jannik
A1 Esposito, Massimiliano
A1 Barra, Felipe
A1 Rodríguez Parrondo, Juan Manuel
AB Micro-reversibility plays a central role in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It is used to prove that systems in contact with a thermal bath relax to canonical ensembles. However, a problem arises when trying to reproduce this proof for classical and quantum collisional baths, i.e. particles at equilibrium interacting with a localized system via collisions. In particular, micro-reversibility appears to be broken and some models do not thermalize when interacting with Maxwellian particles. We clarify these issues by showing that micro-reversibility needs the invariance of evolution equations under time reversal plus the conservation of phase space volume in classical and semiclassical scenarios. Consequently, all canonical variables must be considered to ensure thermalization. This includes the position of the incident particles which maps their Maxwellian distribution to the effusion distribution. Finally, we show an example of seemingly plausible collision rules that do not conserve phase-space volume, and consequently violate the second law. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
PB Elsevier
SN 0378-4371
YR 2020
FD 2020-08-15
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/6368
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/6368
LA eng
NO We acknowledge fruitful discussions with Carlos Mejia-Monasterio. JE wishes to thank Andreas Engel for valuable discussions and for enabling a research stay for JE in Madrid. ME is supported by the European Research Council project NanoThermo (ERC-2015-CoG Agreement No. 681456). FB acknowledges the financial support of FONDECYT grant 1191441 and of the Millennium Nucleus "Physics of active matter'' of the Millennium Scientific Initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism (Chile). JMRP acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Government (Grant Contract, FIS-2017-83706-R).
NO Unión Europea. Horizonte 2020
NO Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
NO FONDECYT Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) CONICYT FONDECYT
NO Millennium Nucleus "Physics of active matter'' of the Millennium Scientific Initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism (Chile)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 17 abr 2025