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Updated: May 11, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Absence of thermalization for systems with long-range interactions coupled to a thermal bath
Pierre de Buyl1, Giovanni De Ninno, Duccio Fanelli
1Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems, Université libre de Bruxelles, B-1050, Brussels.
Abstract:
We investigate the dynamics of a small long-range interacting system, in contact with a large long-range thermal bath. Our analysis reveals the existence of striking anomalies in the energy flux between the bath and the system. In particular, we find that the evolution of the system is not influenced by the kinetic temperature of the bath, as opposed to what happens for short-range collisional systems. As a consequence, the system may get hotter also when its initial temperature is larger than the bath temperature. This observation is explained quantitatively in the framework of the collisionless Vlasov description of toy models with long-range interactions and shown to be valid whenever the Vlasov picture applies, from cosmology to plasma physics..
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