Memory and Friction: From the Nanoscale to the Macroscale

TL;DR

This paper reviews the role of friction across scales, emphasizing recent advances in numerical techniques for extracting and simulating time-dependent friction effects in complex systems.

Contribution

It highlights recent developments in numerical methods for friction extraction and their application to understanding dynamics in complex systems.

Findings

Advanced numerical techniques enable better evaluation of non-Markovian friction.

Time-dependent friction plays a crucial role in complex equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems.

Recent applications demonstrate the importance of friction in many-body dynamics.

Abstract

Friction is a phenomenon that manifests across all spatial and temporal scales, from the molecular to the macroscopic scale. It describes the dissipation of energy from the motion of particles or abstract reaction coordinates and arises in the transition from a detailed molecular-level description to a simplified, coarse-grained model. It has long been understood that time-dependent (non-Markovian) friction effects are critical for describing the dynamics of many systems, but that they are notoriously difficult to evaluate for complex physical, chemical, and biological systems. In recent years, the development of advanced numerical friction extraction techniques and methods to simulate the generalized Langevin equation have enabled exploration of the role of time-dependent friction across all scales. We discuss recent applications of these friction extraction techniques and the growing understanding of the role of friction in complex equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamic many-body systems.