A mechanical model for Fourier's law of heat conduction (Q422400)

The transport phenomena in nonequilibrium thermodynamics are a problem of linear response solved by the Green-Kubo formula as a result of a first order perturbation calculation. But this is also an uncontrolled approximation, thus a fundamental derivation of Fourier's law for heat conduction remains an open problem. In the linear response approach we want to find the physical state \(\rho\) that replaces the initial state \(\rho_0\) when a small change is made to the microscopic dynamics. This corresponds to uniform hyperbolicity. The purpose of this paper is a discussion of a deterministic mechanical model which exhibits realistic behavior for heat conduction. The author starts (see Sections 1--3) with a Hamiltonian chain of \(N+1\) nontrivially coupled mechanical system (nodes) and fixes the temperatures \(T_0\), \(T_N\) of the endpoints chain. A stable temperature profile (Section 4) is defined requiring that the intermediate temperatures be such that for each thermostat there is no net flux of energy in or out of the corresponding node. This allows to determine the intermediate temperatures for a heat-conducting chain. One of the obtained results is Fourier's law in which the amount energy transported by chain is asymptotically \(\sim N^{-1}(T_N-T_0)\) for large \(N\) and small \(T_N-T_0\).