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Temperature overshooting in the Mpemba effect of frictional active matter

Alexander P. Antonov* and Hartmut Löwen

  • *Contact author: alexander.antonov@hhu.de
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Phys. Rev. E 113, 025407 – Published 4 February, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/j4wb-1d9d

Abstract

The traditional Mpemba effect refers to an anomalous cooling phenomenon when an initial hotter system cools down faster than an initial warm system. Such counterintuitive behavior has been confirmed and explored across phase transitions in condensed matter systems and also for colloidal particles exposed to a double-well potential. Here we predict a frictional Mpemba effect for a macroscopic body moving actively on a surface governed by Coulomb (dry) friction. For an initial high temperature, relaxation towards a cold state occurs much faster than that for an intermediate initial temperature, due to a large temperature overshooting in the latter case. This frictional Mpemba effect can be exploited to steer the motion of robots and granules.

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Phys. Rev. E 113, 025407– Published 4 February, 2026
  • Received 30 July 2025
  • Accepted 14 January 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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