Classical Driven Transport in Open Systems with Particle Interactions and General Couplings to Reservoirs

TL;DR

This paper investigates nonequilibrium steady states in driven lattice gases with particle interactions, demonstrating the effectiveness of time-dependent density functional theory in predicting phase diagrams and analyzing boundary effects.

Contribution

It introduces a density functional theory approach to model oscillations near reservoirs and explores the limitations of current principles in phase diagram topology.

Findings

Density oscillations occur near reservoirs in driven lattice gases.

Time-dependent density functional theory accurately predicts phase diagrams.

Current principles are limited to specific boundary conditions.

Abstract

We study nonequilibrium steady states of lattice gases with nearest-neighbor interactions that are driven between two reservoirs. Density profiles in these systems exhibit oscillations close to the reservoirs. We demonstrate that an approach based on time-dependent density functional theory copes with these oscillations and predicts phase diagrams of bulk densities to a good approximation under arbitrary boundary-reservoir couplings. The minimum or maximum current principles can be applied only for specific bulk-adapted couplings. We show that they generally fail to give the correct topology of phase diagrams but can still be useful for getting insight into the mutual arrangement of different phases.