Breaking Microscopic Reversibility with Lévy Flights
Martin Bier (East Carolina University)
| When |
Dec 03, 2018
from 11:00 to 12:00 |
|---|---|
| Where | Amphi. Schrödinger |
| Attendees |
Martin Bier |
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Nonequilibrium systems commonly exhibit Lévy noise. This means that the distribution for the size of the Brownian fluctuations has a “fat” power-law tail. Large Brownian kicks are then more common as compared to the ordinary Gaussian distribution that is associated with systems at equilibrium. We consider a two-state system, i.e. two wells and a barrier in between. It is shown that, when the noise is Lévy, microscopic reversibility (a standard feature of equilibrium dynamics) in the two-state system is broken. We also look at a particle in a potential well V(x) ∝ |x|^n, where n > 0. When such a particle is subject to Gaussian noise, it is not possible to discriminate between a sequence of positions in forward time and a sequence of positions in backward time. This time reversal symmetry, however, is broken if the noise is Lévy.