Related papers: Can one measure negative specific heat in the cano…
We investigate the thermal responses of a harmonic oscillator chain coupled at its boundaries to heat baths held at different temperatures. This setup sustains a steady energy flux, continuously dissipating heat into both reservoirs. By…
Low temperature dependence of specific heat of one- dimensional multicomponent systems at the commensurate- incommensurate phase transition point is studied. It is found that for canonical systems, with a fixed total number of particles,…
For a macroscopic, isolated quantum system in an unknown pure state, the expectation value of any given observable is shown to hardly deviate from the ensemble average with extremely high probability under generic equilibrium and…
Systems with long range interactions in general are not additive, which can lead to an inequivalence of the microcanonical and canonical ensembles. The microcanonical ensemble may show richer behavior than the canonical one, including…
Schmidt et al (Phys Rev Lett 86, 1191 (2001)) observe and analyze a negative specific heat in Na clusters. The analysis is done within the framework of Boltzmann-Gibbs equilibrium statistical mechanics. We argue that this is not the only…
Do negative absolute temperatures matter physics and specifically Statistical Physics? We provide evidence that we can certainly answer positively to this vexata quaestio. The great majority of models investigated by statistical mechanics…
Involvement of the environment is indispensable for establishing the statistical distribution of system. We analyze the statistical distribution of a quantum system coupled strongly with a heat bath. This distribution is determined by…
For more than 100 years, one of the central concepts in statistical mechanics has been the microcanonical ensemble, which provides a way of calculating the thermodynamic entropy for a specified energy. A controversy has recently emerged…
Well known results in string thermodynamics show that there is always a negative specific heat phase in the microcanonical description of a gas of closed free strings whenever there are no winding modes present. We will carefully compute…
For students familiar with equilibrium statistical mechanics, the notion of a positive specific heat, being intimately related to the idea of stability, is both intuitively reasonable and mathematically provable. However, for system in…
Quantum measurement is ultimately a physical process, resulting from an interaction between the measured system and a measuring apparatus. Considering the physical process of measurement within a thermodynamic context naturally raises the…
This work explores fundamental statistical and thermodynamic properties of short-and long-range-interacting systems. The purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, we rigorously prove that the probability distribution of arbitrary few-body…
An analytical method to compute thermodynamic properties of a given Hamiltonian system is proposed. This method combines ideas of both dynamical systems and ensemble approaches to thermodynamics, providing de facto a possible alternative to…
The microcanonical ensemble is the proper ensemble to describe black holes which are not in thermodynamic equilibrium, such as radiating black holes. This choice of ensemble eliminates the problems, e.g. negative specific heat and loss of…
For quantum systems that are weakly coupled to a much 'bigger' environment, thermalization of possibly far from equilibrium initial ensembles is demonstrated: for sufficiently large times, the ensemble is for all practical purposes…
The positivity of the heat capacity is the hallmark of thermal stability of systems in thermodynamic equilibrium. We show that this property remains valid for systems with negative derivative of energy with respect to temperature, as…
A possible definition of the specific heat of open quantum systems is based on the reduced partition function of the system. For a free damped quantum particle, it has been found that under certain conditions, this specific heat can become…
The theory of superstatistics, originally proposed for the study of complex nonequilibrium systems, has recently been extended to studies of small systems interacting with a finite environment, because such systems display interestingly…
We investigate the relation between various statistical ensembles of finite systems. If ensembles differ at the level of fluctuations of the order parameter, we show that the equations of states can present major differences. A sufficient…
The microcanonical ensemble is in important physical situations different from the canonical one even in the thermodynamic limit. In contrast to the canonical ensemble it does not suppress spatially inhomogeneous configurations like phase…