Mpemba effect in terms of mean first passage time

Abstract

The Mpemba effect occurs when a system prepared at a hot temperature cools down faster to the bath temperature than an identical system starting at a warm temperature. We derive the condition for the Mpemba effect in the small-diffusion limit of overdamped Langevin dynamics on a double-well potential. Our results show the strong Mpemba effect occurs when the probability of being in a well at initial and bath temperature match, which agrees with experiments. We also derive the conditions for the weak Mpemba effect and express the conditions for the effects in terms of mean first passage time.