Intermittent many-body dynamics at equilibrium
Abstract
The equilibrium value of an observable defines a manifold in the phase space of an ergodic and equipartitioned many-body system. A typical trajectory pierces that manifold infinitely often as time goes to infinity. We use these piercings to measure both the relaxation time of the lowest frequency eigenmode of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chain (FPU), as well as the fluctuations of the subsequent dynamics in equilibrium. The dynamics in equilibrium is characterized by a power-law distribution of excursion times far off equilibrium, with diverging variance. Long excursions arise from sticky dynamics close to q-breathers localized in normal mode space. Measuring the exponent allows to predict the transition into nonergodic dynamics. We generalize our method to Klein-Gordon lattices (KG) where the sticky dynamics is due to discrete breathers localized in real space.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1611.00434,
title = {Intermittent many-body dynamics at equilibrium},
author = {C. Danieli and D. K. Campbell and S. Flach},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.00434},
year = {2017}
}