Self-Organized Bottleneck in Energy Relaxation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how energy relaxation in large Hamiltonian systems can self-organize into critical bottlenecks, significantly slowing down the relaxation process due to internal state dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a self-organized critical bottleneck in energy relaxation, linking internal state dynamics to relaxation slowdown in complex systems.

Findings

Relaxation slows dramatically at a critical internal state.

The critical state is self-organized during relaxation.

Relevance to condensed matter and molecular relaxation phenomena.

Abstract

We study an energy relaxation process after many degrees of freedom are excited in a Hamiltonian system with a large number of degrees of freedom. Bottlenecks of relaxation, where relaxations of the excited elements are drastically slowed down, are discovered. By defining an internal state for the excited degrees of freedom, it is shown that the drastic slowing down occurs when the internal state is in a critical state. The relaxation dynamics brings the internal state into the critical state, and the critical bottleneck of relaxation is self-organized. Relevance of our result to relaxation phenomena in condensed matters or large molecules is briefly discussed.