Collective and chaotic motion in self-bound many-body systems

Abstract

We investigate the interplay of collective and chaotic motion in a classical self-bound N-body system with two-body interactions. This system displays a hierarchy of three well separated time scales that govern the onset of chaos, damping of collective motion and equilibration. Comparison with a mean-field problem shows that damping is mainly due to dephasing. The Lyapunov exponent, damping and equilibration rates depend mildly on the system size N.

Comments: 5 pages, 4 EPS-figures, uses psfig.sty, revised version