Infinite Time Limit Research Articles

A theory of magnetic-like fields for viscoelastic fluids

We formulate the Oldroyd-B model for viscoelastic fluids in terms of magnetic-like fields obeying a set of equations analogous to Maxwell’s equations. In the limit of infinite relaxation time for the polymer, the polymeric stress tensor can be identified with the Maxwell stress tensor of a magnetic field. Away from this asymptotic case, the stress tensor of the polymer cannot be decomposed in terms of a tensor product of a magnetic field any more and several theoretical issues arise. We show that the analogy between the Oldroyd-B model and Maxwell’s equations can still be rigorously extended provided that one defines three magnetic-like fields obeying Maxwell’s equations with magnetic currents and charges. This solves the theoretical caveats and leads to a better understanding of the viscoelastic instability. In particular, we evidence a gauge symmetry which unifies some previous works, and we investigate several gauge choices. As an illustration we apply our method to viscoelastic Taylor–Couette flow but this theory of ‘viscoelastic fields’ is general and may be useful in a large variety of viscoelastic flows. The present study may also be of interest from the electromagnetic point of view, as it provides real systems possessing magnetic-like charges (monopoles) and currents.

On stochastic quantisation of supersymmetric theories

We explain how stochastic TQFT supersymmetry can be made compatible with space supersymmetry. Taking the case of N=2 supersymmetric quantum mechanics, (the proof would be the same for the Wess–Zumino model), we determine the kernels that ensure the convergence of the stochastic process toward the standard path integral, under the condition that they are covariant under supersymmetry. They depend on a massive parameter M that can be chosen at will and modifies the course of the stochastic evolution, but the infinite stochastic time limit of the correlation functions is in fact independent on the choice of M.

Mathematical modelling of the removal of organic micropollutants in the activated sludge process: a linear biodegradation model

Before wastewaters can be released into the environment, they must be treated to reduce the concentration of organic pollutants in the effluent stream. There is a growing concern as to whether wastewater treatment plants are able to effectively reduce the concentration of micropollutants that are also contained in their influent streams. We investigate the removal of micropollutants in treatment plants by analysing a model that includes biodegradation and sorption as the main mechanisms of micropollutant removal. For the latter a linear adsorption model is used in which adsorption only occurs onto particulates. The steady-state solutions of the model are found and their stability is determined as a function of the residence time. In the limit of infinite residence time, we show that the removal of biodegradable micropollutants is independent of the processes of adsorption and desorption. The limiting concentration can be decreased by increasing the concentration of growth-related macropollutants. Although, in principle, it is possible that the concentration of micropollutants is minimized at a finite value of the residence time, this was found not to be the case for the particular biodegradable micropollutants considered. For nonbiodegradable pollutants, we show that their removal is always optimized at a finite value of the residence time. For finite values of the residence time, we obtain a simple condition which identifies whether biodegradation is more or less efficient than adsorption as a removal mechanism. Surprisingly, we find that, for the micropollutants considered, adsorption is always more important than biodegradation, even when the micropollutant is classified as being highly biodegradable with low adsorption. doi:10.1017/S1446181118000226

MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF THE REMOVAL OF ORGANIC MICROPOLLUTANTS IN THE ACTIVATED SLUDGE PROCESS: A LINEAR BIODEGRADATION MODEL

Before wastewaters can be released into the environment, they must be treated to reduce the concentration of organic pollutants in the effluent stream. There is a growing concern as to whether wastewater treatment plants are able to effectively reduce the concentration of micropollutants that are also contained in their influent streams. We investigate the removal of micropollutants in treatment plants by analysing a model that includes biodegradation and sorption as the main mechanisms of micropollutant removal. For the latter a linear adsorption model is used in which adsorption only occurs onto particulates.The steady-state solutions of the model are found and their stability is determined as a function of the residence time. In the limit of infinite residence time, we show that the removal of biodegradable micropollutants is independent of the processes of adsorption and desorption. The limiting concentration can be decreased by increasing the concentration of growth-related macropollutants. Although, in principle, it is possible that the concentration of micropollutants is minimized at a finite value of the residence time, this was found not to be the case for the particular biodegradable micropollutants considered.For nonbiodegradable pollutants, we show that their removal is always optimized at a finite value of the residence time. For finite values of the residence time, we obtain a simple condition which identifies whether biodegradation is more or less efficient than adsorption as a removal mechanism. Surprisingly, we find that, for the micropollutants considered, adsorption is always more important than biodegradation, even when the micropollutant is classified as being highly biodegradable with low adsorption.

Mechanical Systems with Singular Equilibria and the Coulomb Dynamics of Three Charges

We consider mechanical systems for which the matrices of second partial derivatives of the potential energies at equilibria have zero eigenvalues. It is assumed that their potential energies are holomorphic functions in these singular equilibrium states. For these systems, we prove the existence of proper bounded (for positive time) solutions of the Newton equations of motion convergent to equilibrium in the infinite-time limit. These results are applied to the Coulomb systems of three point charges with singular equilibrium in a line.

Optimal noise-canceling shortcuts to adiabaticity: application to noisy Majorana-based gates

Adiabatic braiding of Majorana zero modes can be used for topologically protected quantum information processing. While extremely robust to many environmental perturbations, these systems are vulnerable to noise with high-frequency components. Ironically, slower processes needed for adiabaticity allow more noise-induced excitations to accumulate, resulting in an antiadiabatic behavior that limits the precision of Majorana gates if some noise is present. In a recent publication (2017 Phys. Rev. B 96 075158), fast optimal protocols were proposed as a shortcut for implementing the same unitary operation as the adiabatic braiding in a low-energy effective model. These shortcuts sacrifice topological protection in the absence of noise but provide performance gains and remarkable robustness to noise due to the shorter evolution time. Nevertheless, gates optimized for vanishing noise are suboptimal in the presence of noise. If we know the noise strength beforehand, can we design protocols optimized for the existing unavoidable noise, which will effectively correct the noise-induced errors? We address this question in the present paper, focusing on the same low-energy effective model. We find such optimal protocols using simulated-annealing Monte Carlo simulations. The numerically found pulse shapes, which we fully characterize, are in agreement with Pontryagin’s minimum principle, which allows us to arbitrarily improve the approximate numerical results (due to discretization and imperfect convergence) and obtain numerically exact optimal protocols. The protocols are bang–bang (sequence of sudden quenches) for vanishing noise, but contain continuous segments in the presence of multiplicative noise due to the nonlinearity of the master equation governing the evolution. We find that such noise-optimized protocols completely eliminate the above-mentioned antiadiabatic behavior. The final error corresponding to these optimal protocols monotonically decreases with the total time (in three different regimes). A liner fit to 1/τ indicates extrapolation of the cost function to finite value in the limit. However, quadratic and cubic fits are more suggestive of the cost function extrapolating to zero in the limit of infinite time. Our results set the precision limit of the device as a function of the noise strength and total time.

Steady-state measurement-induced nonlocality in thermal reservoir

We examined measurement-induced nonlocality (MIN) of a central system for which every of the constituent qubit is embedded in its respective independent thermal reservoir. By introducing anisotropy to the Heisenberg XY interaction of the qubits, we showed that the strength of the MIN can be enhanced apparently. The anisotropy of the spin interaction can also be employed to generate MIN from the initial zero-MIN states. In the infinite-time limit, the steady-state MIN is independent of the initial states and is determined solely by the anisotropic parameter of the system and the decoherence factor of the thermal reservoir.

Precise algorithm to generate random sequential adsorption of hard polygons at saturation.

Random sequential adsorption (RSA) is a time-dependent packing process, in which particles of certain shapes are randomly and sequentially placed into an empty space without overlap. In the infinite-time limit, the density approaches a "saturation" limit. Although this limit has attracted particular research interest, the majority of past studies could only probe this limit by extrapolation. We have previously found an algorithm to reach this limit using finite computational time for spherical particles and could thus determine the saturation density of spheres with high accuracy. In this paper, we generalize this algorithm to generate saturated RSA packings of two-dimensional polygons. We also calculate the saturation density for regular polygons of three to ten sides and obtain results that are consistent with previous, extrapolation-based studies.

Had We But World Enough, and Time... But We Don’t!: Justifying the Thermodynamic and Infinite-Time Limits in Statistical Mechanics

In this paper, I compare the use of the thermodynamic limit in the theory of phase transitions with the infinite-time limit in the explanation of equilibrium statistical mechanics. In the case of phase transitions, I will argue that the thermodynamic limit can be justified pragmatically since the limit behavior (i) also arises before we get to the limit and (ii) for values of N that are physically significant. However, I will contend that the justification of the infinite-time limit is less straightforward. In fact, I will point out that even in cases where one can recover the limit behavior for finite t, i.e. before we get to the limit, one cannot recover this behavior for realistic time scales. I will claim that this leads us to reconsider the role that the rate of convergence plays in the justification of infinite limits and calls for a revision of the so-called Butterfield's principle.

Absorbing phase transitions in deterministic fixed-energy sandpile models.

We investigate the origin of the difference, which was noticed by Fey etal. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 145703 (2010)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.104.145703], between the steady state density of an Abelian sandpile model (ASM) and the transition point of its corresponding deterministic fixed-energy sandpile model (DFES). Being deterministic, the configuration space of a DFES can be divided into two disjoint classes such that every configuration in one class should evolve into one of absorbing states, whereas no configurations in the other class can reach an absorbing state. Since the two classes are separated in terms of toppling dynamics, the system can be made to exhibit an absorbing phase transition (APT) at various points that depend on the initial probability distribution of the configurations. Furthermore, we show that in general the transition point also depends on whether an infinite-size limit is taken before or after the infinite-time limit. To demonstrate, we numerically study the two-dimensional DFES with Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld toppling rule (BTW-FES). We confirm that there are indeed many thresholds. Nonetheless, the critical phenomena at various transition points are found to be universal. We furthermore discuss a microscopic absorbing phase transition, or a so-called spreading dynamics, of the BTW-FES, to find that the phase transition in this setting is related to the dynamical isotropic percolation process rather than self-organized criticality. In particular, we argue that choosing recurrent configurations of the corresponding ASM as an initial configuration does not allow for a nontrivial APT in the DFES.

Coherence-generating power of quantum dephasing processes

We provide a quantification of the capability of various quantum dephasing processes to generate coherence out of incoherent states. The measures defined, admitting computable expressions for any finite Hilbert space dimension, are based on probabilistic averages and arise naturally from the viewpoint of coherence as a resource. We investigate how the capability of a dephasing process (e.g., a non-selective orthogonal measurement) to generate coherence depends on the relevant bases of the Hilbert space over which coherence is quantified and the dephasing process occurs, respectively. We extend our analysis to include those Lindblad time evolutions which, in the infinite time limit, dephase the system under consideration and calculate their coherence generating power as a function of time. We further identify specific families of such time evolutions that, although dephasing, have optimal (over all quantum processes) coherence generating power for some intermediate time. Finally, we investigate the coherence generating capability of random dephasing channels.

Asymptotic localization in the Bose-Hubbard model

We consider the Bose-Hubbard model. Our focus is on many-body localization, which was described by many authors in such models, even in the absence of disorder. Since our work is rigorous, and since we believe that the localization in this type of models is not strictly valid in the infinite-time limit, we necessarily restrict our study to “asymptotic localization” also known as “quasi-localization:” We prove that transport and thermalization are small beyond perturbation theory in the limit of large particle density. Our theorem takes the form of a many-body Nekhoroshev estimate. An interesting and new aspect of this model is the following: The localization cannot be inferred from a lack of hybridization between zero-hopping eigenstates. Naively speaking, all these eigenstates appear resonant and one has to move to a dressed basis to see the absence of resonances that are responsible for (quasi-)localization.

Transition probability for class of two level system time dependent Hamiltonians

Transition probabilities for a class of two level systems described by explicitly time dependent Hamiltonians are considered. Provided only that the approach to the infinite time limit is non-trivial falling at least as fast as 1/t for large t, the transition probability takes a particularly simple form depending only on the value of Hamiltonian parameters in this limit.

Anomalous dynamical phase in quantum spin chains with long-range interactions

The existence or absence of non-analytic cusps in the Loschmidt-echo return rate is traditionally employed to distinguish between a regular dynamical phase (regular cusps) and a trivial phase (no cusps) in quantum spin chains after a global quench. However, numerical evidence in a recent study [J. C. Halimeh and V. Zauner-Stauber, arXiv:1610.02019] suggests that instead of the trivial phase a distinct anomalous dynamical phase characterized by a novel type of non-analytic cusps occurs in the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model when interactions are sufficiently long-range. Using an analytic semiclassical approach and exact diagonalization, we show that this anomalous phase also arises in the fully-connected case of infinite-range interactions, and we discuss its defining signature. Our results show that the transition from the regular to the anomalous dynamical phase coincides with Z2-symmetry breaking in the infinite-time limit, thereby showing a connection between two different concepts of dynamical criticality. Our work further expands the dynamical phase diagram of long-range interacting quantum spin chains, and can be tested experimentally in ion-trap setups and ultracold atoms in optical cavities, where interactions are inherently long-range.

On the paradox of reversible processes in thermodynamics

This paper discusses an argument by Norton (in: European Philosophy of Science—Philosophy of Science in Europe and the Viennese Heritage, Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 17, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 197–210, 2014, 2016) to the effect that reversible processes in thermodynamics have paradoxical character, due to the infinite-time limit. For Norton, one can “dispel the fog of paradox” by adopting a distinction between idealizations and approximations, which he himself puts forward. Accordingly, reversible processes ought to be regarded as approximations, rather than idealizations. Here, we critically assess his proposal. In doing so, we offer a resolution of his alleged paradox based on the original work by Tatiana Ehrenfest-Afanassjeva on the foundations of thermodynamics.

Finite-time and finite-size scalings in the evaluation of large-deviation functions: Numerical approach in continuous time.

Rare trajectories of stochastic systems are important to understand because of their potential impact. However, their properties are by definition difficult to sample directly. Population dynamics provides a numerical tool allowing their study, by means of simulating a large number of copies of the system, which are subjected to selection rules that favor the rare trajectories of interest. Such algorithms are plagued by finite simulation time and finite population size, effects that can render their use delicate. In this paper, we present a numerical approach which uses the finite-time and finite-size scalings of estimators of the large deviation functions associated to the distribution of rare trajectories. The method we propose allows one to extract the infinite-time and infinite-size limit of these estimators, which-as shown on the contact process-provides a significant improvement of the large deviation function estimators compared to the standard one.

The glassy state of matter: Its definition and ultimate fate

The objective of this communication is to clarify the meanings of solid and liquid, to dwell on the ultimate fate of glass in the limit of infinitely long time, and to propose a modern, improved definition of glass. We review the four characteristic states of matter related to vitrification: the stable equilibrium liquid (L), the metastable supercooled liquid (SCL), the unstable nonequilibrium glass (G), and the stable crystal (C). We also discuss some relevant terms and phenomena, including glass transition, crystallization, non-crystalline, amorphous, solid, and frozen. We review several previously published definitions of glass and finally propose an improved definition in two alternative forms. The first improved definition is: “Glass is a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline state of matter that appears solid on a short time scale but continuously relaxes towards the liquid state.” This is an intuitive description for the general public and young students. An alternative, more detailed definition to be understood and used by advanced students, researchers, and professors is: “Glass is a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline condensed state of matter that exhibits a glass transition. The structure of glasses is similar to that of their parent supercooled liquids (SCL), and they spontaneously relax toward the SCL state. Their ultimate fate, in the limit of infinite time, is to crystallize.” This definition is for experts who understand the meaning of glass transition.

Two-Dimensional Coulomb Dynamics of Two and Three Equal Negative Charges in the Field of Two Equal Fixed Positive Charges

We find periodic and bounded (for positive time) solutions of the planar Coulomb equations of motion for two and three identical negative charges in the field of two equal fixed positive charges. The analyzed systems have equilibrium configurations and the constructed bounded solutions converge to these configurations in the infinite-time limit. The periodic solutions are obtained with the help of the Lyapunov center theorem.

Slow relaxation and sensitivity to disorder in trapped lattice fermions after a quench

We consider a system of non-interacting fermions in one dimension subject to a single-particle potential consisting of (a) a strong optical lattice, (b) a harmonic trap, and (c) uncorrelated on-site disorder. After a quench, in which the center of the harmonic trap is displaced, we study the occupation function of the fermions and the time-evolution of experimental observables. Specifically, we present numerical and analytical results for the post-quench occupation function of the fermions, and analyse the time-evolution of the real-space density profile. Unsurprisingly for a non-interacting (and therefore integrable) system, the infinite-time limit of the density profile is non-thermal. However, due to Bragg-localization of the higher-energy single-particle states, the approach to even this non-thermal state is extremely slow. We quantify this statement, and show that it implies a sensitivity to disorder parametrically stronger than that expected from Anderson localization.

Inhomogeneous diffusion and ergodicity breaking induced by global memory effects.

We introduce a class of discrete random-walk model driven by global memory effects. At any time, the right-left transitions depend on the whole previous history of the walker, being defined by an urnlike memory mechanism. The characteristic function is calculated in an exact way, which allows us to demonstrate that the ensemble of realizations is ballistic. Asymptotically, each realization is equivalent to that of a biased Markovian diffusion process with transition rates that strongly differs from one trajectory to another. Using this "inhomogeneous diffusion" feature, the ergodic properties of the dynamics are analytically studied through the time-averaged moments. Even in the long-time regime, they remain random objects. While their average over realizations recovers the corresponding ensemble averages, departure between time and ensemble averages is explicitly shown through their probability densities. For the density of the second time-averaged moment, an ergodic limit and the limit of infinite lag times do not commutate. All these effects are induced by the memory effects. A generalized Einstein fluctuation-dissipation relation is also obtained for the time-averaged moments.