The Sun within: active processes from two-temperature models

Abstract

We propose an embedding of standard active particle models in terms of two-temperature processes. One temperature refers to an ambient thermal bath, and the other temperature effectively describes "hot spots," i.e., systems with few degrees of freedom showing important population homogenization or even inversion of energy levels as a result of activation. As a result, the effective Carnot efficiency would get much higher than for our standard macroscopic thermal engines, making connection with the recent conundrum of hot mitochondria. Moreover, that setup allows to quantitatively specify the resulting nonequilibrium driving, useful in particular for bringing the notion of heat into play, and making easy contact with thermodynamic features. Finally, we observe that the shape transition in the steady low-temperature behavior of run-and-tumble particles (with the interesting emergence of edge states at high persistence) is stable and occurs for all temperature differences, including close-to-equilibrium.