SP Seminar 03.03.2016 @ SISSA: Maes

[Condensed Matter Section]

JOINT ICTP/SISSA STATISTICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR

Thursday, 3th March - 14:00 pm

Venue:  at SISSA, room 128, first floor


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Speaker: Christian Maes (Leuven)

Title: Driving-induced stability with long-range effects

Abstract:

We give a sufficient condition under which an applied nonequilibrium
driving in a medium always has a stabilizing effect on an attached
quasi-static probe. We show that the resulting Lamb shift in the
symmetric part of the stiffness matrix with respect to equilibrium is
positive and depends strongly on the nonequilibrium density far away
from the probe. For illustration we take the example of diffusive
medium particles with a self-potential in the shape of a Mexican hat,
repulsive at the origin and attractive near the border of a disk where
the potential energy gets very large. They undergo a rotational force
around the origin. For no or small rotation in the medium, the origin is
an unstable fixed point for the probe and the precise shape of the
self-potential at large distances from the origin is irrelevant for the
statistical force there. Above a certain threshold of the rotation
amplitude the origin becomes stable for the probe and more details of
the medium start to matter.

(joint work with Urna Basu, Pierre de Buyl and Karel Netocny)