On the dynamical and statistical properties of a quartic mean-field Hamiltonian model

Abstract

Mean-field systems provide a natural framework in which collective effects persist as the number of degrees of freedom N increases, raising fundamental questions about the emergence of integrability and the nature of chaos in large but finite systems. We investigate the dynamical and statistical properties of a quartic mean-field Hamiltonian model, with particular emphasis on the relation between the thermodynamic limit and finite-size chaotic dynamics. We first analyze the thermodynamic limit of the model within the Vlasov collisionless framework and derive the corresponding self-consistent single-particle description. We identify the conditions under which the mean-field dynamics becomes effectively autonomous and show numerically that fluctuations of the relevant intensive quantities vanish algebraically with N, supporting the emergence of integrability as N goes to infinity. We then study the finite-N dynamics by computing the largest Lyapunov exponent over an exceptionally wide range of N, spanning several orders of magnitude. We find that the largest Lyapunov exponent decays algebraically with N, consistently with the suppression of chaos in the thermodynamic limit for mean-field Hamiltonian models. Using tools from non-extensive statistical mechanics, we further analyze the time evolution of the entropic index q and demonstrate that, although transient values q > 1 may appear at intermediate times, q systematically converges to unity as the observation time increases. This behavior indicates that the finite-N dynamics is strongly chaotic in the asymptotic regime and that previously reported q > 1 values for the present models originate from finite-time effects rather than from a persistent weakly chaotic phase.