Small perturbation of a disordered harmonic chain by a noise and an anharmonic potential (Q377521)

The thermal conductivity of a pinned disordered harmonic chain is studied, which is weakly perturbed by noise and an anharmonic potential. The noise is controlled by a parameter \(\lambda\rightarrow0\), and the anharmonicity by a parameter \(\lambda'\leq\lambda\), that means the noise is the dominant perturbative effect. After the discussion of some approximative, intuitive results concerning the thermal conductivity \(\kappa\) of disordered harmonic chains perturbed by weak noise only, the paper is then devoted to the proof of two theorems. Defining the thermal conductivity of the chain by the Green-Kubo formula, under suitable hypotheses, it is shown that (1) \(\kappa=O(\lambda)\) as \(\lambda\rightarrow0\), and, (2) in the absence of the anharmonic potential (\(\lambda'=0\)), that \(\kappa\sim\lambda\). The computations in the article focus on the current due to harmonic interactions between neighboring particles. Then, general inequalities on Markov processes allow to obtain the upper bound \(\kappa=O(\lambda)\) in presence of both noise and nonlinear forces. The lower bound \(\kappa\geq c\lambda\) is established by means of a variational formula. The results of the article are in sharp contrast with the ones for an ordered chain for which \(\kappa\sim 1/\lambda\), and so they show the persistence of localization effects for non-integrable dynamics.