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Zeroth Law investigation on the logarithmic thermostat
Puneet Kumar Patra1, Baidurya Bhattacharya2
1Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, India. puneet.patra@civil.iitkgp.ernet.in.
Abstract:
The Zeroth Law implies that the three systems, each separately in equilibrium and having the same temperature, must remain so when brought in pairwise or simultaneous thermal contact with each other. We examine numerically the conformity of the logarithmic thermostat with the Zeroth Law of thermodynamics. Three specific scenarios, with different heat reservoirs, are investigated. For each scenario, the system of interest, S1 - a single harmonic oscillator, is coupled with two heat reservoirs, S2 and S3. S2 and S3 are variously chosen to be from the Nosé-Hoover, the Hoover-Holian, the C1,2 and the logarithmic thermostats. In the scenarios involving logarithmic thermostat, we observe a violation of the Zeroth Law of thermodynamics, in computationally achievable time, at low to moderate coupling strengths: (i) the kinetic and configurational temperatures of the systems are different, (ii) momentum distribution of log thermostat is non-Gaussian, and (iii) a temperature gradient is created between the kinetic and configurational variables of the log thermostat.
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