Dynamical freezing of relaxation to equilibrium

Stefano Iubini, Liviu Chirondojan, Gian-Luca Oppo, Antonio Politi, Paolo Politi

Published 2018-11-14Version 1

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.