Comment on the presence of chaos in mean field dynamics inside the spinodal region

Abstract

In this letter we re-analyze the role of chaos in the mean field simulations of spinodal decomposition. We demonstrate that, conversely to recent publications, the RPA unstable modes are only weakly non-linear and weakly coupled during the early clusterization of the system. The Lyapunov exponents are shown to be nothing but the largest imaginary RPA frequencies and the early mean field evolution, even of a randomly initialized trajectory, is shown to be mostly understandable within the framework of linear instabilities. Finally we recall how the time scales are related to the use of a reasonable range for the nuclear force.