English

Dynamical freezing of relaxation to equilibrium

Statistical Mechanics 2019-03-04 v3

Abstract

We provide evidence of an extremely slow thermalization occurring in the Discrete NonLinear Schr\"odinger (DNLS) model. At variance with many similar processes encountered in statistical mechanics - typically ascribed to the presence of (free) energy barriers - here the slowness has a purely dynamical origin: it is due to the presence of an adiabatic invariant, which freezes the dynamics of a tall breather. Consequently, relaxation proceeds via rare events, where energy is suddenly released towards the background. We conjecture that this exponentially slow relaxation is a key ingredient contributing to the non-ergodic behavior recently observed in the negative temperature region of the DNLS equation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.05798,
  title  = {Dynamical freezing of relaxation to equilibrium},
  author = {Stefano Iubini and Liviu Chirondojan and Gian-Luca Oppo and Antonio Politi and Paolo Politi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.05798},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Corrected some misprints. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. Supplementary material is included