Related papers: Can one measure negative specific heat in the cano…
While the canonical ensemble has been tremendously successful in capturing thermal statistics of macroscopic systems, deviations from canonical behavior exhibited by small systems are not well understood. Here, using a small two dimensional…
We study dipolarly coupled three dimensional spin systems in both the microcanonical and the canonical ensembles by introducing appropriate numerical methods to determine the microcanonical temperature and by realizing a canonical model of…
For models which exhibit a continuous phase transition in the thermodynamic limit a numerical study of small systems reveals a non-monotonic behaviour of the microcanonical specific heat as a function of the system size. This is in contrast…
The thermodynamic properties such as the specific heat are uniquely determined by the second moments of the energy distribution for a given ensemble averaging. However for small particle numbers the results depend on the ensemble chosen. We…
In systems with long-range interactions, since energy is a non-additive quantity, ensemble inequivalence can arise: it is possible that different statistical ensembles lead to different equilibrium descriptions, even in the thermodynamic…
The ultimate precision of any measurement of the temperature of a quantum system is the inverse of the local quantum thermal susceptibility [De Pasquale et al., Nature Communications 7, 12782 (2016)] of the subsystem with whom the…
Conventional thermo-statistics address infinite homogeneous systems within the canonical ensemble. However, some 170 years ago the original motivation of thermodynamics was the description of steam engines, i.e. boiling water. Its essential…
Ensemble inequivalence has been observed in several systems. In particular it has been recently shown that negative specific heat can arise in the microcanonical ensemble in the thermodynamic limit for systems with long-range interactions.…
A thermodynamic model for multifragmentation which is frequently used appears to give very different values for specific heat at constant volume depending upon whether canonical or grand canonical ensemble is used. The cause for this…
Employing different statistical ensembles may lead to qualitatively different results concerning averages of physical observables on the mesoscopic scale. Here we discuss differences between the canonical and the grandcanonical ensembles…
Thermodynamics dictates that the specific heat of a system is strictly non-negative. However, in finite classical systems there are well known theoretical and experimental cases where this rule is violated, in particular finite atomic…
Two approaches to describe the thermodynamics of a subsystem that interacts with a thermal bath are considered. Within the first approach, the mean system energy $E_{S}$ is identified with the expectation value of the system Hamiltonian,…
The grand canonical ensemble lies at the core of quantum and classical statistical mechanics. A small system thermalizes to this ensemble while exchanging heat and particles with a bath. A quantum system may exchange quantities represented…
We compare phase transition(-like) phenomena in small model systems for both microcanonical and canonical ensembles. The model systems correspond to a few classical (non-quantum) point particles confined in a one-dimensional box and…
In the realm of statistical mechanics, it has been established that there is no distinction between the micro-canonical and canonical ensembles in the thermodynamic limit. However, this paradigm may alter when addressing statistical…
Heat capacities of model systems with finite numbers of effective degrees of freedom are evaluated using canonical and microcanonical thermodynamics. Discrepancies between both approaches, which are observed even in the infinite-size limit,…
Steady nonequilibria dissipate energy and, when changing external parameters, an extra or excess heat accompanies the relaxation to the new nonequilibrium condition. For nonequilibrium systems in contact with a thermal bath, the heat…
We consider a soluble model of multifragmentation which is similar in spirit to many models which have been used to fit intermediate energy heavy ion collision data. In this model $c_v$ is always positive but for finite nuclei $c_p$ can be…
The canonical statistics describes the statistical properties of an open system by assuming its coupling with the heat bath infinitesimal in comparison with the total energy in thermodynamic limit. In this paper, we generally derive a…
The evaluation of the specific heat of an open, damped quantum system is a subtle issue. One possible route is based on the thermodynamic partition function which is the ratio of the partition functions of system plus bath and of the bath…