Recent Progress on the Mpemba Effect: From Anomalous Relaxation to Tunable Dynamics
ABSTRACT
The Mpemba effect originally refers to the counterintuitive observation that, under certain conditions, initially hotter water can freeze faster than initially colder water. In modern nonequilibrium physics, this idea has been generalized to anomalous relaxation: a system prepared farther from equilibrium may reach the final equilibrium state faster than one prepared closer to it. Over the past decade, the Mpemba effect has been reported in a wide range of systems, including spin systems, colloidal suspensions, granular fluids, and quantum systems.
This seminar will review recent developments in the study of the Mpemba effect. It first introduces the modern definition of the effect and related effects. Theoretical descriptions based on relaxation spectra, metastable dynamics, and mode amplitudes are then discussed, followed by representative examples from various systems. Finally, this seminar will briefly present our ongoing work on a tunable Mpemba effect in a polymer–bead system, where inertia and a plateau in the force–extension relation provide a simple coarse-grained mechanism for anomalously fast relaxation.
*The presentation will be in Korean.
