Survival and extreme statistics of work, heat, and entropy production in steady-state heat engines.

We derive universal bounds for the finite-time survival probability of the stochastic work extracted in steady-state heat engines and the stochastic heat dissipated to the environment. We also find estimates for the time-dependent thresholds that these quantities do not surpass with a prescribed probability. At long times, the tightest thresholds are proportional to the large deviation functions of stochastic entropy production.

Kuramoto model with additional nearest-neighbor interactions: Existence of a nonequilibrium tricritical point.

A paradigmatic framework to study the phenomenon of spontaneous collective synchronization is provided by the Kuramoto model comprising a large collection of phase oscillators of distributed frequencies that are globally coupled through the sine of their phase differences. We study here a variation of the model by including nearest-neighbor interactions on a one-dimensional lattice. While the mean-field interaction resulting from the global coupling favors global synchrony, the nearest-neighbor interaction may have cooperative or competitive effects depending on the sign and the magnitude of the nearest-neighbor coupling.