Dynamical thermalization of disordered nonlinear lattices

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2009 Nov;80(5 Pt 2):056212. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.80.056212. Epub 2009 Nov 24.

Abstract

We study numerically how the energy spreads over a finite disordered nonlinear one-dimensional lattice, where all linear modes are exponentially localized by disorder. We establish emergence of dynamical thermalization characterized as an ergodic chaotic dynamical state with a Gibbs distribution over the modes. Our results show that the fraction of thermalizing modes is finite and grows with the nonlinearity strength.