Ring statistics in 2D-silica: effective temperatures in equilibrium

Abstract

The thermodynamic properties of subsystems in strong interaction with the neighborhood can largely differ from the standard behavior. Here we study the thermodynamic properties of rings and triplets in equilibrated disordered 2D-silica. Their statistics follows a Boltzmann behavior, albeit with a strongly reduced temperature. This effective temperature strongly depends on the length scale of the chosen subsystem. From a systematic analysis of the 1D Ising model and an analytically solvable model we suggest that these observations reflect the presence of strong local positive energy correlations.