Effect of pressure on thermalization of one-dimensional nonlinear chains

Abstract

Pressure plays a vital role in changing the transport properties of matter. To understand this phenomenon at a microscopic level, we here focus on a more fundamental problem, i.e., how pressure affects the thermalization properties of solids. As illustrating examples, we study the thermalization behavior of the monatomic chain and the mass-disordered chain of Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou-β under different strains in the thermodynamic limit. It is found that the pressure-induced change in nonintegrability results in qualitatively different thermalization processes for the two kinds of chains. However, for both cases, the thermalization time follows the same law -it is inversely proportional to the square of the nonintegrability strength. This result suggests that pressure can significantly change the integrability of a system, which provides a new perspective for understanding the pressure-dependent thermal transport behavior.