Statistical Mechanics where Newton's Third Law is Broken
Abstract
There is a variety of situations in which Newton's third law is violated. Generally, the action-reaction symmetry can be broken for mesoscopic particles, when their effective interactions are mediated by a nonequilibrium environment. Here, we investigate different classes of nonreciprocal interactions relevant to real experimental situations and present their basic statistical mechanics analysis. We show that in mixtures of particles with such interactions, distinct species acquire distinct kinetic temperatures. In certain cases, the nonreciprocal systems are exactly characterized by a pseudo-Hamiltonian; i.e., being intrinsically nonequilibrium, they can nevertheless be described in terms of equilibrium statistical mechanics. Our results have profound implications, in particular, demonstrating the possibility to generate extreme temperature gradients on the particle scale. We verify the principal theoretical predictions in experimental tests performed with two-dimensional binary complex plasmas.
Additional Information
© 2015 Published by the American Physical Society. This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Received 4 March 2014; revised manuscript received 17 October 2014; published 26 March 2015. The authors acknowledge support from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme, ERC Grant Agreement No. 267499. M. H. acknowledges support by a fellowship within the Postdoc Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). C.-R. D. acknowledges support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC), Grant No. 11405030.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevX.5.011035.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 56940
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150424-084335495
- 267499
- European Research Council (European Union)
- German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
- 11405030
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC)
- Created
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2015-04-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field