Fluctuating temperature outside superstatistics: thermodynamics of small systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermodynamics of small systems with temperature fluctuations, challenging the superstatistics framework and proposing the fundamental temperature as a meaningful observable for such systems.

Contribution

It introduces a new statistical approach for small systems that lack superstatistical descriptions, emphasizing the role of fundamental temperature as an observable.

Findings

Temperature fluctuations are significant in small systems.

Superstatistics may not fully describe temperature in isolated small systems.

Fundamental temperature can serve as a useful observable in small system thermodynamics.

Abstract

The existence of fluctuations of temperature has been a somewhat controversial topic in thermodynamics but nowadays it is recognized that they must be taken into account in small, finite systems. Although for nonequilibrium steady states superstatistics is becoming the \textit{de facto} framework for expressing such temperature fluctuations, some recent results put into question the idea of temperature as a phase space observable. In this work we present and explore the statistics that describes a part of an isolated system, small enough to have well-defined uncertainties in energy and temperature, but lacking a superstatistical description. These results motivate the use of the so-called fundamental temperature as an observable and may be relevant for the statistical description of small systems in physical chemistry.