Log-Sobolev inequalities for boundary-driven anharmonic chains
Abstract
We study the non-equilibrium steady state of a weakly anharmonic chain of oscillators driven at its boundary by Langevin thermostats at unequal temperatures. Under a perturbative weak-anharmonicity condition, we prove a full-gradient logarithmic Sobolev inequality whose constant is independent of the chain length . For homogeneous pinned chains, an additional quantitative regularity assumption yields a boundary space-time logarithmic Sobolev inequality and relative-entropy decay on the same relaxation time scale as the harmonic chain. The proof extracts a finite-dimensional Gaussian component from the boundary noise and compares conditional terminal-state laws by a change of variables. The estimates are uniform over bounded positive temperatures and require no near-equilibrium assumption on their difference.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.13953,
title = {Log-Sobolev inequalities for boundary-driven anharmonic chains},
author = {Jianfeng Lu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13953},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
29 pages