Thermal contact through a two-temperature kinetic Ising chain

TL;DR

This paper models thermal contact between two bodies using an inhomogeneous two-temperature Ising chain with Glauber dynamics, analyzing heat exchange and correlations with advanced mathematical techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inhomogeneous kinetic parameter in the Ising chain model and studies its impact on non-equilibrium stationary correlations and heat exchange statistics.

Findings

Influence of inhomogeneous kinetics on spin correlations.

Exact calculation of heat exchange cumulants.

Mapping to spin domain wall dynamics with free fermion methods.

Abstract

We consider a model for thermal contact through a diathermal interface between two macroscopic bodies at different temperatures: an Ising spin chain with nearest neighbor interactions is endowed with a Glauber dynamics with different temperatures and kinetic parameters on alternating sites. The inhomogeneity of the kinetic parameter is a novelty with respect to the model of Ref.[1] and we exhibit its influence upon the stationary non equilibrium values of the two-spin correlations at any distance. By mapping to the dynamics of spin domain walls and using free fermion techniques, we determine the scaled generating function for the cumulants of the exchanged heat amounts per unit of time in the long time limit.