The motivation for this paper is the analysis of the fixed-density Ising lattice gas in the presence of a gravitational field. This is seen as a particular instance of an Ising model with a slowly varying magnetic field in the fixed magnetization ensemble. We first characterize the typical magnetization profiles in the regime in which the contribution of the magnetic field competes with the bulk energy term. We then discuss in more detail the particular case of a gravitational field and the arising interfacial phenomena. In particular, we identify the macroscopic profile and propose several conjectures concerning the interface appearing in the phase coexistence regime. The latter are supported by explicit computations in an effective model. Finally, we state some conjectures concerning equilibrium crystal shapes in the presence of a gravitational field, when the latter contributes to the energy only to surface order.

We prove the equivariant divergence formula for axiom A flow attractors. It is a pointwisely-defined and recursive formula for perturbation of SRB measures along center-unstable manifolds. It depends on only the zeroth and first order derivatives of the map, the observable, and the perturbation. Hence, the linear response acquires an ‘ergodic theorem’, which means that it can be sampled by recursively computing a few vectors on one orbit.

Optimal control theory deals with finding protocols to steer a system between assigned initial and final states, such that a trajectory-dependent cost function is minimized. The application of optimal control to stochastic systems is an open and challenging research frontier, with a spectrum of applications ranging from stochastic thermodynamics to biophysics and data science. Among these, the design of nanoscale electronic components motivates the study of underdamped dynamics, leading to practical and conceptual difficulties. In this work, we develop analytic techniques to determine protocols steering finite time transitions at a minimum thermodynamic cost for stochastic underdamped dynamics. As cost functions, we consider two paradigmatic thermodynamic indicators. The first is the Kullback–Leibler divergence between the probability measure of the controlled process and that of a reference process. The corresponding optimization problem is the underdamped version of the Schrödinger diffusion problem that has been widely studied in the overdamped regime. The second is the mean entropy production during the transition, corresponding to the second law of modern stochastic thermodynamics. For transitions between Gaussian states, we show that optimal protocols satisfy a Lyapunov equation, a central tool in stability analysis of dynamical systems. For transitions between states described by general Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions, we introduce an infinite-dimensional version of the Poincaré-Lindstedt multiscale perturbation theory around the overdamped limit. This technique fundamentally improves the standard multiscale expansion. Indeed, it enables the explicit computation of momentum cumulants, whose variation in time is a distinctive trait of underdamped dynamics and is directly accessible to experimental observation. Our results allow us to numerically study cost asymmetries in expansion and compression processes and make predictions for inertial corrections to optimal protocols in the Landauer erasure problem at the nanoscale.

Interacting particle systems in a finite-volume in equilibrium are often described by a grand-canonical ensemble induced by the corresponding Hamiltonian, i.e. a finite-volume Gibbs measure. However, in practice, directly measuring this Hamiltonian is not possible, as such, methods need to be developed to calculate the Hamiltonian potentials from measurable data. In this work, we give an expansion of the chemical potential in terms of the correlation functions of such a system in the thermodynamic limit. This is a justification of a formal approach of Nettleton and Green from the 50’s, that can be seen as an inverse cluster expansion.

The statement of [1, Lemma 2.3] is incorrect; the correct one is weaker. For ϕ ∈ C(X ) and Lemma 2.3 For every ∈ N and ϕ ∈ C(X ), it holds Proof Fix ∈ N. For every n ∈ N there are unique numbers k n ∈ N and r n ∈ {0, . . . , − 1} such that n = k n + r n . It holds