Heat transport in one dimension

Abstract

We review the state of the art of the problem of heat conduction in one dimensional nonlinear lattices. The peculiar role of finite size and time corrections to the predictions of the hydrodynamic theory is discussed. The emerging scenario indicates that when dealing with systems, whose spatial size is comparable with the mean-free path of peculiar nonlinear excitations, hydrodynamic predictions at leading order are no more predictive. We can conjecture that one should take into account estimates of subleading contributions, which could play a major role in some regions of the parameter space in ‘small’ systems.