A Survey on Rigorous Results for the Dynamics of Periodic FPU Chains

Abstract

In this paper we review some analytic results on the dynamics of the FPU system. In the first part of the paper, having in mind that the FPU Hamiltonian and the Toda Hamiltonian are close to each other, we present some results on the action angle variables of the Toda system and deduce some stability properties for the dynamics of the FPU system. We first focus on the case of finitely many particles and then we study the limit \(N\rightarrow \infty \). We also present some results on the continuous limit of the Toda chain showing that it is well described by a couple of KdV equations. Then we study directly the dynamics of the function interpolating the FPU system and show that the dynamics is Hamiltonian and that the Hamiltonian is very close to a function of the first three Hamiltonians of the KdV hierarchy. In the second part of the paper we present some results valid in the thermodynamic limit, according to which the time auto correlation functions of some suitably constructed observables decay slowly implying lower bounds on the thermalization times of the system.