Heat conduction in the α-β-Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chain

Abstract

Recent simulation results on heat conduction in a one-dimensional chain with an asymmetric inter-particle interaction potential and no onsite potential found non-anomalous heat transport in accordance to Fourier’s law. This is a surprising result since it was long believed that heat conduction in one-dimensional systems is in general anomalous in the sense that the thermal conductivity diverges as the system size goes to infinity. In this paper we report on detailed numerical simulations of this problem to investigate the possibility of a finite temperature phase transition in this system. Our results indicate that the unexpected results for asymmetric potentials is a result of insufficient chain length, and does not represent the asymptotic behavior.