The metastable Mpemba effect corresponds to a non-monotonic temperature dependence of extractable work
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2101.06394,
title = {The metastable Mpemba effect corresponds to a non-monotonic temperature dependence of extractable work},
author = {Raphaël Chétrite and Avinash Kumar and John Bechhoefer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06394},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures