Mpemba effect without a wall
Abstract
Experimental demonstrations of the Mpemba effect in a colloidal-particle system have imposed an instantaneous temperature quench via an initial condition where individual particle trajectories are drawn from a high-temperature Boltzmann distribution and then evolve in a bath at lower temperature. The potential used for the high-temperature distribution has had two walls that impose a finite range of initial positions, even at effectively infinite temperatures. The potential for evolution in the bath had no walls and matched that used for the initial condition over its support. For low bath temperatures, the difference between the dynamics with and without walls is negligible. Nonetheless, it has been speculated that the walls are perhaps more important than they seem and might even be required for the Mpemba effect to occur. Here, we introduce a new potential that lacks walls and use it for both the initial high temperature state and for subsequent evolution. This new potential then allows us to investigate by simulation Mpemba effects at finite-quench rates. Our results help clarify intuitions concerning the existence of a Mpemba effect and show that the Mpemba effect appears only for bath-temperature quenches faster than a critical quench rate.
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BibTeX
@misc{sane2026mpemba,
title = {{Mpemba effect without a wall}},
author = {Siddharth S. Sane and John Bechhoefer},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.32871},
eprint = {2609.32871},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32871},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Mpemba effect without a wall
AU - Siddharth S. Sane
AU - John Bechhoefer
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.32871
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32871
AB - Experimental demonstrations of the Mpemba effect in a colloidal-particle system have imposed an instantaneous temperature quench via an initial condition where individual particle trajectories are drawn from a high-temperature Boltzmann distribution and then evolve in a bath at lower temperature. The potential used for the high-temperature distribution has had two walls that impose a finite range of initial positions, even at effectively infinite temperatures. The potential for evolution in the bath had no walls and matched that used for the initial condition over its support. For low bath temperatures, the difference between the dynamics with and without walls is negligible. Nonetheless, it has been speculated that the walls are perhaps more important than they seem and might even be required for the Mpemba effect to occur. Here, we introduce a new potential that lacks walls and use it for both the initial high temperature state and for subsequent evolution. This new potential then allows us to investigate by simulation Mpemba effects at finite-quench rates. Our results help clarify intuitions concerning the existence of a Mpemba effect and show that the Mpemba effect appears only for bath-temperature quenches faster than a critical quench rate.
ER -