Equipartition threshold in chains of anharmonic oscillators

We perform a detailed numerical study of the transition to equipartition in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam quartic model and in a class of potentials of given symmetry using the normalized spectral entropy as a probe. We show that the typical time scale for the equipartition of energy among Fourier modes grows linearly with system size: this is the time scale associated with the smallest frequency present in the system. We obtain two different scaling behaviors, either with energy or with energy density, depending on the scaling of the initial condition with system size. These different scaling behaviors can be understood by a simple argument, based on the Chirikov overlap criterion. Some aspects of the universality of this result are investigated: symmetric potentials show a similar transition, regulated by the same time scale

Self-consistent check of the validity of Gibbs calculus using dynamic

The high- and low-energy limits of a chain of coupled rotators are integrable and correspond respectively to a set of free rotators and to a chain of harmonic oscillators. For intermediate values of the energy, numerical calculations show the agreement of finite time averages of physical observables with their Gibbsian estimate. The boundaries between the two integrable limits and the statistical domain are analytically computed using the Gibbsian estimates of dynamical observables. For large energies the geometry of nonlinear resonances enables the definition of relevant 1.5-degree-of-freedom approximations of the dynamics. They provide resonance overlap parameters whose Gibbsian probability distribution may be computed. Requiring the support of this distribution to be right above the large-scale stochasticity threshold of the 1.5-degree-of-freedom dynamics yields the boundary at the large-energy limit. At the low-energy limit, the boundary is shown to correspond to the energy where the specific heat departs from that of the corresponding harmonic chain

Stages of dynamics in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam system as probed by the first Toda integral

We investigate the long term evolution of trajectories in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) system, using as a probe the first non-trivial integral J in the hierarchy of integrals of the corresponding Toda lattice model. To this end we perform simulations of FPU-trajectories for various classes of initial conditions produced by the excitation of isolated modes, packets, as well as `generic' (random) initial data. For initial conditions corresponding to localized energy excitations, J exhibits variations yielding `sigmoid' curves similar to observables used in literature, e.g., the `spectral entropy' or various types of `correlation functions'. However, J(t) is free of fluctuations inherent in such observables, hence it constitutes an ideal observable for probing the timescales involved in the stages of FPU dynamics. We observe two fundamental timescales: i) the `time of stability' (in which, roughly, FPU trajectories behave like Toda), and ii) the `time to equilibrium' (beyond which energy equipartition is reached). Below a specific energy crossover, both times are found to scale exponentially as an inverse power of the specific energy. However, this crossover goes to zero with increasing the degrees of freedom N as εc∼N^(−b), with b∈[1.5,2.5]. For `generic data' initial conditions, instead, J(t) allows to quantify the continuous in time slow diffusion of the FPU trajectories in a direction transverse to the Toda tori