Heat conduction in the disordered Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chain

Abstract

We address the question of the effect of disorder on heat conduction in an anharmonic chain with interactions given by the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) potential. In contrast to the conclusions of an earlier paper [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 63 (2001)], which found that disorder could induce a finite thermal conductivity at low temperatures, we find no evidence of a finite-temperature transition in conducting properties. Instead, we find that at low temperatures, small system-size transport properties are dominated by disorder but the asymptotic system size dependence of current is given by the usual FPU result J~1/N2/3. We also present interesting results on the binary-mass ordered FPU chain.