Fundamental temperature in the superstatistical description of non-equilibrium steady states

Abstract

Among the statistical mechanical frameworks able to describe systems in non-equilibrium steady states such as collisionless plasmas, self-gravitating systems and other complex systems, superstatistics have gained recent attention. Superstatistics postulates a superposition of canonical systems with inverse temperatures $\beta$ described by a probability distribution depending on the external conditions. Unfortunately, the uncertainty about $\beta$ cannot be attributed to fluctuations of a phase space function, and this suggests that the distribution of $\beta$ is purely of statistical nature and must be inferred rather than measured. This lack of direct observability of the superstatistical temperature then becomes a conceptual issue in need of resolution. In this work we address this issue, showing that a mapping exists between functions of the superstatistical temperature and functions of the recently proposed fundamental temperature, a model-dependent function of the energy, in such a way that their expectation values coincide. We illustrate the use of this mapping by computing the conditional distribution of inverse temperature given energy for the $q$-canonical ensemble, as well as the full inverse temperature distribution, without the use of Laplace inversion.