Statistical mechanics of a cold tracer in a hot bath.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a zero-temperature particle interacting linearly with a bath of hot Brownian particles. Starting with the most general model of a linearly coupled bath, we eliminate the bath degrees of freedom exactly to map the tracer dynamics onto a generalized Langevin equation, allowing for an arbitrary external potential on the tracer. We apply this result to determine the fate of a tracer connected by springs to N identical bath particles or inserted within a harmonic chain of hot particles. In the former "fully connected" case, we find the tracer transitions between an effective equilibrium regime at large N and a fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT)-violating regime at finite N, while in the latter "loop" model the tracer never satisfies an FDT. We then study the fully connected model perturbatively for large but finite N, demonstrating signatures of irreversibility such as ratchet currents, non-Boltzmann statistics, and positive entropy production. Finally, we specialize to harmonic external potentials on the tracer, allowing us to exactly solve the dynamics of both the tracer and the bath for an arbitrary linear model. We apply our findings to show that a cold tracer in a hot lattice suppresses the fluctuations of the lattice in a long-ranged manner, and we generalize this result to linear elastic field theories.