Equilibrium dynamical correlations in the Toda chain and other integrable models

Abstract

We investigate the form of equilibrium spatiotemporal correlation functions of conserved quantities in the Toda lattice and in other integrable models. From numerical simulations we find that the correlations satisfy ballistic scaling with a remarkable collapse of data from different times. We examine special limiting choices of parameter values, for which the Toda lattice tends to either the harmonic chain or the equal mass hard-particle gas. In both these limiting cases, one can obtain the correlations exactly and we find excellent agreement with the direct Toda simulation results. We also discuss a transformation to "normal mode" variables, as commonly done in hydrodynamic theory of nonintegrable systems, and find that this is useful, to some extent, even for the integrable system. The striking differences between the Toda chain and a truncated version, expected to be nonintegrable, are pointed out.