We study the dynamics of thermalization and the approach to equilibrium in the classical phi^4 theory in 1+1 spacetime dimensions. At thermal equilibrium we exploit the equivalence between the classical canonical averages and transfer matrix quantum traces of the anharmonic oscillator to obtain exact results for the temperature dependence of several observables, which provide a set of criteria for thermalization. We find that the Hartree approximation is remarkably accurate in equilibrium. The non-equilibrium dynamics is studied by numerically solving the equations of motion in light-cone coordinates for a broad range of initial conditions and energy densities.The time evolution is described by several stages with a cascade of energy towards the ultraviolet. After a transient stage, the spatio-temporal gradient terms become larger than the nonlinear term and a stage of universal cascade emerges.This cascade starts at a time scale t_0 independent of the initial conditions (except for very low energy density). Here the power spectra feature universal scaling behavior and the front of the cascade k(t) grows as a power law k(t) sim t^alpha with alpha lesssim 0.25. The wake behind the cascade is described as a state of Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE) with all correlations being determined by the equilibrium functional form with an effective time dependent temperatureTeff(t) which slowly decreases as sim t^{-alpha}.Two well separated time scales emerge while Teff(t) varies slowly, the wavectors in the wake with k < k(t) attain LTE on much shorter time scales.This universal scaling stage ends when the front of the cascade reaches the cutoff at a time t_1 sim a^{-1/alpha}. Virialization starts to set much earlier than LTE. We find that strict thermalization is achieved only for an infinite time scale.
We study the dynamics of thermalization and the approach to equilibrium in the classical phi^4 theory in 1+1 spacetime dimensions. At thermal equilibrium we exploit the equivalence between the classical canonical averages and transfer matrix quantum traces of the anharmonic oscillator to obtain exact results for the temperature dependence of several observables, which provide a set of criteria for thermalization. We find that the Hartree approximation is remarkably accurate in equilibrium. The non-equilibrium dynamics is studied by numerically solving the equations of motion in light-cone coordinates for a broad range of initial conditions and energy densities.The time evolution is described by several stages with a cascade of energy towards the ultraviolet. After a transient stage, the spatio-temporal gradient terms become larger than the nonlinear term and a stage of universal cascade emerges.This cascade starts at a time scale t_0 independent of the initial conditions (except for very low energy density). Here the power spectra feature universal scaling behavior and the front of the cascade k(t) grows as a power law k(t) sim t^alpha with alpha lesssim 0.25. The wake behind the cascade is described as a state of Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE) with all correlations being determined by the equilibrium functional form with an effective time dependent temperatureTeff(t) which slowly decreases as sim t^{-alpha}.Two well separated time scales emerge while Teff(t) varies slowly, the wavectors in the wake with k < k(t) attain LTE on much shorter time scales.This universal scaling stage ends when the front of the cascade reaches the cutoff at a time t_1 sim a^{-1/alpha}. Virialization starts to set much earlier than LTE. We find that strict thermalization is achieved only for an infinite time scale.
We study the dynamics of thermalization and the approach to equilibrium in the classical ${\ensuremath{\varphi}}^{4}$ theory in 1+1 spacetime dimensions. At thermal equilibrium we exploit the equivalence between the classical canonical averages and transfer matrix quantum traces of the anharmonic oscillator to obtain exact results for the temperature dependence of several observables, which provide a set of criteria for thermalization. In this context, comparing to the exact results we find that the Hartree approximation is remarkably accurate in equilibrium. The nonequilibrium dynamics is studied by numerically solving the equations of motion in light-cone coordinates for a broad range of initial conditions and energy densities. The long time evolution is described by several distinct stages, all characterized by a cascade of energy towards the ultraviolet. After an initial transient stage, the spatiotemporal gradient terms become larger than the nonlinear term, and there emerges a stage of universal cascade. This cascade starts at a time scale t0 independent of the initial conditions (except for very low energy density). During this stage the power spectra feature universal scaling behavior and the front of the cascade k(t) moves to the ultraviolet as a power law $\overline{k}(t)\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ with $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\lesssim}0.25$ an exponent weakly dependent on the energy density alone. The wake behind the cascade is described as a state of Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE) with all correlations being determined by the equilibrium functional form with an effective time dependent temperature Teff(t), which slowly decreases with time as $\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}.$ Two well separated time scales emerge: while Teff(t) varies slowly, the wave vectors in the wake with k<k(t) attain LTE on much shorter time scales. This universal scaling stage ends when the front of the ultraviolet cascade reaches the cutoff at a time scale ${t}_{1}\ensuremath{\sim}{a}^{\ensuremath{-}1/\ensuremath{\alpha}}.$ Virialization starts to set much earlier than LTE. We find that strict thermalization is achieved only for an infinite time scale.
We investigate the dynamics of thermalization and the approach to equilibrium in the classical ${\ensuremath{\phi}}^{4}$ theory in 3+1 spacetime dimensions. The nonequilibrium dynamics is studied by numerically solving the equations of motion in a light-cone-like discretization of the model for a broad range of initial conditions and energy densities. A smooth cascade of energy towards the ultraviolet is found to be the basic mechanism of thermalization. After an initial transient stage, at a time scale of several hundred inverse masses, the squared magnitude of the field spatial gradient becomes larger than the nonlinear term and there emerges a stage of universal cascade, independent of the details of the initial conditions. As the cascade progresses, the modes with higher wave numbers, but well behind the forefront of the cascade, exhibit weaker and weaker nonlinearities well described by the Hartree approximation, while the infrared modes retain strong self-interactions. As a consequence, two time scales for equilibration appear as characteristic of two time-dependent wave number regions. For ${k}^{2}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}\overline{{\ensuremath{\phi}}^{2}}(t)$, we observe an effective equilibration to a time-dependent powerlike spectrum with a time scale in the hundreds of inverse masses; cutoff effects are absent and the Hartree approximation holds for ${k}^{2}\ensuremath{\gg}\overline{{\ensuremath{\phi}}^{2}}(t)$. On the other hand, infrared modes with ${k}^{2}\ensuremath{\lesssim}\overline{{\ensuremath{\phi}}^{2}}(t)$ equilibrate only by time scales in the millions of inverse masses when the cutoff effects become dominant and complete thermalization is setting in. Accordingly, we observe in the field correlator a relatively large and long-lived deviation from the Hartree behavior of a nonperturbative character. There corresponds an effective mass governing the long distance behavior of the correlator which turns out to be significantly smaller than the Hartree mass which is exhibited by the modes with ${k}^{2}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}\overline{{\ensuremath{\phi}}^{2}}(t)$. Virialization and the equation of state start to set in much earlier than thermalization. The applicability of these results in quantum field theory for large occupation numbers and small coupling is analyzed.
Thermalization of classical fields is investigated in a \\phi^4 scalar field theory in 1+1 dimensions, discretized on a lattice. We numerically integrate the classical equations of motion using initial conditions sampled from various nonequilibrium probability distributions. Time-dependent expectation values of observables constructed from the canonical momentum are compared with thermal ones. It is found that a closed system, evolving from one initial condition, thermalizes to high precision in the thermodynamic limit, in a time-averaged sense. For ensembles consisting of many members with the same energy, we find that expectation values become stationary - and equal to the thermal values - in the limit of infinitely many members. Initial ensembles with a nonzero (noncanonical) spread in the energy density or other conserved quantities evolve to noncanonical stationary ensembles. In the case of a narrow spread, asymptotic values of primary observables are only mildly affected. In contrast, fluctuations and connected correlation functions will differ substantially from the canonical values. This raises doubts on the use of a straightforward expansion in terms of 1PI-vertex functions to study thermalization.
Nonperturbative dynamics of quantum fields out of equilibrium is often described by the time evolution of a hierarchy of correlation functions, using approximation methods such as Hartree, large Nf, and nPI-effective action techniques. These truncation schemes can be implemented equally well in a classical statistical system, where results can be tested by comparison with the complete nonlinear evolution obtained by numerical methods. For a (1+1)-dimensional scalar field we find that the early-time behavior is reproduced qualitatively by the Hartree dynamics. The inclusion of direct scattering improves this to the quantitative level. We show that the emergence of nonthermal temperature profiles at intermediate times can be understood in terms of the fixed points of the evolution equations in the Hartree approximation. The form of the profile depends explicitly on the initial ensemble. While the truncated evolution equations do not seem to be able to get away from the fixed point, the full nonlinear evolution shows thermalization with a (surprisingly) slow relaxation.
We describe a Hartree ensemble method to approximately solve the Heisenberg equations for the ϕ 4 model in 1 + 1 dimensions. We compute the energies and number densities of the quantum particles described by the ϕ field and find that the particles initially thermalize with a Bose-Einstein distribution for the particle density. Gradually, however, the distribution changes towards classical equipartition. Using suitable initial conditions quantum thermalization is achieved much faster than the onset of this undesirable equipartition. We also show how the numerical efficiency of our method can be significantly improved. 1. Hartree ensemble approximation Non-perturbative equilibrium properties of quantum field theories are studied with great success using numerical lattice techniques. Similarly one would like to investigate quantum field dynamics non-perturbatively. This has obvious applications to e.g. heavy ion collisions and early universe physics. Furthermore, it could be used to study equilibrium properties in cases where Monte Carlo methods do not work, such as in QCD at finite density or chiral gauge theories. Using Monte Carlo techniques to compute the Minkowski time path integral is, of course, not possible. Neither can one directly solve the Heisenberg equations for the quantum field operators. Hence one has to resort to approximations, such as classical dynamics [2] (for recent work see [3]), large n or Hartree (see e.g. [4]). Here we discuss a different type of Hartree or gaussian approximation than used previously, in which we use an ensemble of gaussian wavefunctions to compute Green functions. Ref. [1] also contains a discussion of this method and a detailed presentation will appear elsewhere. We use the lattice ϕ4 model in 1+1 dimensions as a test model, which has the following Heisenberg operator equations, ˙ˆϕ = ˆπ, ˙ ˆπ = ( ∆ − µ
This work is devoted to the study of relaxation--dissipation processes in systems described by Quantum Field Theory. In the first part, I focus on the phi^4 scalar quantum field theory in finite volume in the large N limit. I find that the zero-mode quantum fluctuations cannot grow macroscopically large starting from microscopic initial conditions, while the long-wavelength fluctuations do scale with the linear size of the system, signalling dynamical infrared properties quite different from the equilibrium ones. I also introduce a non-gaussian Hartree-Fock approximation (tdHF) and I derive the mean-field coupled time-dependent Schroedinger equations for the modes of the scalar field. The dynamical evolution of a uniform condensate is studied in a further controlled gaussian approximation, for N=1. Results similar to the large N case show an internal inconsistency of this approximation. I also study the dynamics of the system in infinite volume in the broken symmetry phase. The data show that the fixed points of the evolution cover at most the classically metastable part of the static effective potential. I finally study the dynamical evolution for the O(N+1) nonlinear sigma model in 1+1 dimensions in the large N limit. I first of all verify that the large coupling limit of the O(N+1) phi^4 model, which renders the model non linear, commutes with the large N limit, so that the O(infty) nonlinear sigma model is uniquely defined. I then study the evolution of several observables, like the spectrum of produced particles, finding no evidence for parametric resonance. I conclude with some remarks on the ``state of art'' in gauge theories and some comments about the open issues in the subject.