Dynamics of relaxation and fluctuations of the equilibrium state in an incompletely chaotic system

J Phys Chem B. 2011 May 12;115(18):5340-6. doi: 10.1021/jp109388x. Epub 2011 Mar 22.

Abstract

An incompletely chaotic system, with a perturbation of the integrable part that does not obey selection rules, relaxes to an equilibrium state that lies between the initial state and thermal equilibrium. We analyze here a system of two atoms in a circular transversally harmonic waveguide. The dynamics of expectation values of generic observables and their fluctuations in the long-time limit are studied for this model. The relaxation demonstrates a nonexponential behavior and slows down as the initial-state energy increases. The fluctuation amplitude has a tendency to decrease with an increase of the initial state width.