English

Nonexistence of classical diamagnetism and nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems for charged particles on a curved surface

Statistical Mechanics 2010-02-22 v2

Abstract

We show that the classical Langevin dynamics for a charged particle on a closed curved surface in a time-independent magnetic field leads to the canonical distribution in the long time limit. Thus the Bohr-van Leeuwen theorem holds even for a finite system without any boundary and the average magnetic moment is zero. This is contrary to the recent claim by Kumar and Kumar (EPL, {\bf 86} (2009) 17001), obtained from numerical analysis of Langevin dynamics, that a classical charged particle on the surface of a sphere in the presence of a magnetic field has a nonzero average diamagnetic moment. We extend our analysis to a many-particle system on a curved surface and show that the nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems also hold in this geometry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0912.4697,
  title  = {Nonexistence of classical diamagnetism and nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems for charged particles on a curved surface},
  author = {Punyabrata Pradhan and Udo Seifert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.4697},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

6 pages; typos corrected