2021/01/16 by Raphaël Chétrite, Avinash Kumar, John Bechhoefer · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.3389/fphy.2021.654271
published as Frontiers in Physics 9, 654271 (2021) · 8 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2021/01/16 · arxiv updated 2021/03/31
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.