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In and out of equilibrium

Nature volume 433, pages 222–225 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Albert Einstein's work on brownian motion showed how thermal equilibrium could be brought about by work exchanged through thermal fluctuations and viscous dissipation. Glasses are out-of-equilibrium systems in which this exchange happens at widely different timescales simultaneously. Theory then suggests the fascinating possibility that such behaviour may lead to a more general form of thermalization, in which the effective temperature shared by all components differs at each timescale.

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Figure 1: The two-time (t,t′) correlation C(t,t′) of a typical physical quantity in terms of log(t−t′) for two temperatures T1>T2.
Figure 2: M copies of a system (A1, A2,..., AM).
Figure 3: Fluctuation–dissipation plot for a sheared supercooled liquid, taken from ref. 5.

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  1. PMMH Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles, 10 rue Vauquelin, Paris, 75231, CEDEX 05, France

    J. Kurchan

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Kurchan, J. In and out of equilibrium. Nature 433, 222–225 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03278

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