Response Theory Identifies Reaction Coordinates and Explains Critical Phenomena in Noisy Interacting Systems

Abstract: We consider a class of nonequilibrium systems of interacting agents with pairwise interactions and quenched disorder in the dynamics featuring, in the thermodynamic limit, phase transitions. We provide conditions on the microscopic structure of interactions among the agents that lead to a dimension reduction of the system in terms of a finite number of reaction coordinates. Such reaction coordinates prove to be proper nonequilibrium thermodynamic variables as they carry information on correlation, memory and resilience properties of the system. Phase transitions can be identified and quantitatively characterised as singularities of the complex valued susceptibility functions associated to the reaction coordinates. We provide analytical and numerical evidence of how the singularities affect the physical properties of finite size systems.