Role of the nature of noise in the thermal conductance of mechanical systems.

Focusing on a paradigmatic small system consisting of two coupled damped oscillators, we survey the role of the Lévy-Itô nature of the noise in the thermal conductance. For white noises, we prove that the Lévy-Itô composition (Lebesgue measure) of the noise is irrelevant for the thermal conductance of a nonequilibrium linearly coupled chain, which signals the independence of mechanical and thermodynamical properties. In contrast, for the nonlinearly coupled case, the two types of properties mix and the explicit definition of the noise plays a central role.