Geometry protected probabilistic structure in many-body dynamics

Abstract

Insomuch as statistical mechanics circumvents the formidable task of addressing many-body dynamics, it remains a challenge to derive macroscopic properties from a solution to Hamiltonian equations for microscopic motion of an isolated system. Launching new attacks on this long-standing problem -- part of Hilbert's sixth problem -- is urgently important, for focus of statistical phenomena is shifting from a fictitious ensemble to an individual member, i.e. a mechanically isolated system. Here we uncover a common probabilistic structure, the concentration of measure, in Hamiltonian dynamics of two families of systems, the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) model which is finite-dimensional and (almost) ergodic, and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) which is infinite-dimensional and suffers strong ergodicity breaking. That structure is protected by the geometry of phase space and immune to ergodicity breaking, leading to counterintuitive phenomena. Notably, an isolated FPUT behaves as a thermal ideal gas even for strong modal interaction, with the thermalization time analogous to the Ehrenfest time in quantum chaos, while an isolated GPE system, without any quantum inputs, escapes the celebrated ultraviolet catastrophe through nonlinear wave localization in the mode space, and the Rayleigh-Jeans equilibrium sets in the localization volume. Our findings may have applications in nonlinear optics and cold-atom dynamics.