Specific heat of thermally driven chains

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gautama, Michiel, Khodabandehlou, Faezeh, Maes, Christian, Santra, Ion
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Gautama, Michiel
Khodabandehlou, Faezeh
Maes, Christian
Santra, Ion
author_facet Gautama, Michiel
Khodabandehlou, Faezeh
Maes, Christian
Santra, Ion
contents 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 introducing slow variations in the bath temperatures, we quantify the resulting excess heat currents and thereby obtain the nonequilibrium heat capacity matrix at fixed but arbitrary temperature differences. We demonstrate the existence of a well-defined thermodynamic limit for long chains. The specific heat associated with energy exchanges with a single bath depends on the difference in friction coefficients governing the system-bath couplings. That thermokinetic effect is typical for nonequilibrium response. When the couplings with the thermal baths acquire temperature dependence, the specific heat correspondingly inherits a nontrivial temperature dependence, in sharp contrast with equilibrium. Our results provide the first explicit determination of specific heat(s) in a locally interacting, spatially extended driven system. Beyond its exact solvability, the model may offer a natural nonequilibrium extension of the Dulong-Petit law, capturing the high-temperature behavior of driven molecules.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14056
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Specific heat of thermally driven chains
Gautama, Michiel
Khodabandehlou, Faezeh
Maes, Christian
Santra, Ion
Statistical Mechanics
Soft Condensed Matter
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 introducing slow variations in the bath temperatures, we quantify the resulting excess heat currents and thereby obtain the nonequilibrium heat capacity matrix at fixed but arbitrary temperature differences. We demonstrate the existence of a well-defined thermodynamic limit for long chains. The specific heat associated with energy exchanges with a single bath depends on the difference in friction coefficients governing the system-bath couplings. That thermokinetic effect is typical for nonequilibrium response. When the couplings with the thermal baths acquire temperature dependence, the specific heat correspondingly inherits a nontrivial temperature dependence, in sharp contrast with equilibrium. Our results provide the first explicit determination of specific heat(s) in a locally interacting, spatially extended driven system. Beyond its exact solvability, the model may offer a natural nonequilibrium extension of the Dulong-Petit law, capturing the high-temperature behavior of driven molecules.
title Specific heat of thermally driven chains
topic Statistical Mechanics
Soft Condensed Matter
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14056