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Abstract A fundamental principle of chaotic quantum dynamics is that local subsystems eventually approach a thermal equilibrium state. The corresponding timescales increase with subsystem size as equilibration is limited by the hydrodynamic build-up of fluctuations on extended length scales. We perform large-scale quantum simulations that monitor particle-number fluctuations in tunable ladders of hard-core bosons and explore how the build-up of fluctuations changes as the system crosses over from integrable to fully chaotic dynamics. Our results indicate that the growth of large-scale fluctuations in chaotic, far-from-equilibrium systems is quantitatively determined by equilibrium transport coefficients, in agreement with the predictions of fluctuating hydrodynamics. This emergent hydrodynamic behaviour of subsystem fluctuations provides a test of fluctuation–dissipation relations far from equilibrium and allows the accurate determination of equilibrium transport coefficients using far-from-equilibrium quantum dynamics.
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Theory and simulation of electrokinetic fluctuations in electrolyte solutions at the mesoscale
Electrolyte solutions play an important role in energy storage devices, whose performance relies heavily on the electrokinetic processes at sub-micron scales. Although fluctuations and stochastic features become more critical at small scales, the long-range Coulomb interactions pose a particular challenge for both theoretical analysis and simulation of fluid systems with fluctuating hydrodynamic and electrostatic interactions. Here, we present a theoretical framework based on the Landau–Lifshitz theory to derive closed-form expressions for fluctuation correlations in electrolyte solutions, indicating significantly different decorrelation processes of ionic concentration fluctuations from hydrodynamic fluctuations, which provides insights for understanding transport phenomena of coupled fluctuating hydrodynamics and electrokinetics. Furthermore, we simulate fluctuating electrokinetic systems using both molecular dynamics (MD) with explicit ions and mesoscopic charged dissipative particle dynamics (cDPD) with semi-implicit ions, from which we identify that the spatial probability density functions of local charge density follow a gamma distribution at sub-nanometre scale (i.e. $$0.3\,{\rm nm}$$ ) and converge to a Gaussian distribution above nanometre scales (i.e. $$1.55\,{\rm nm}$$ ), indicating the existence of a lower limit of length scale for mesoscale models using Gaussian fluctuations. The temporal correlation functions of both hydrodynamic and electrokinetic fluctuations are computed from all-atom MD and mesoscale cDPD simulations, showing good agreement with the theoretical predictions based on the linearized fluctuating hydrodynamics theory.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2103967
- PAR ID:
- 10328419
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Fluid Mechanics
- Volume:
- 942
- ISSN:
- 0022-1120
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2022.377
