Statistical mechanics of nonequilibrium systems of rotators with alternated spins

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the limiting behavior of a lattice of nonlinear Hamiltonian rotators with alternating spins under weak stochastic perturbations, revealing a unique invariant measure and describing the non-Hamiltonian stochastic dynamics of actions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stochastic equation governing the actions of perturbed rotators and proves the uniqueness and mixing properties of the limiting invariant measure.

Findings

The limiting dynamics of actions is governed by a non-Hamiltonian stochastic equation.

The stationary measures of the perturbed system converge to a unique invariant measure.

The invariant measure's projection on angles is the Lebesgue measure on the torus.

Abstract

We consider a finite region of a d-dimensional lattice of nonlinear Hamiltonian rotators, where neighbouring rotators have opposite spins and are coupled by a small potential of order $\varepsilon^a,\, a\geq1/2$. We weakly stochastically perturb the system in such a way that each rotator interacts with its own stochastic Langevin-type thermostat with a force of order $\varepsilon$. Then we introduce the action-angle variables for the system of uncoupled rotators ($\varepsilon=0$) and note that the sum of actions over all nodes is conserved by the purely Hamiltonian dynamics of the system with $\varepsilon>0$. We investigate the limiting (as $\varepsilon \rightarrow 0$) dynamics of actions for solutions of the $\varepsilon$-perturbed system on time intervals of order $\varepsilon^{-1}$. It turns out that the limiting dynamics is governed by a certain autonomous (stochastic) equation for the vector of actions. This equation has a completely non-Hamiltonian nature. The $\varepsilon$-perturbed system has a unique stationary measure $\widetilde \mu^\varepsilon$ and is mixing. Any limiting point of the family $\{\widetilde \mu^\varepsilon\}$ of stationary measures as $\varepsilon\rightarrow 0$ is an invariant measure of the system of uncoupled integrable rotators. There are plenty of such measures. However, it turns out that only one of them describes the limiting dynamics of the $\varepsilon$-perturbed system: we prove that a limiting point of $\{\widetilde\mu^\varepsilon\}$ is unique, its projection to the space of actions is the unique stationary measure of the autonomous equation above, which turns out to be mixing, and its projection to the space of angles is the normalized Lebesque measure on the torus $\mathbb{T}^N$. Most of results and convergences we obtain are uniform in the number $N$ of rotators.