Dynamical Thermalization of Disordered Nonlinear Lattices

Abstract

We study numerically how the energy spreads over a finite disordered nonlinear one-dimensional lattice, where all linear modes are exponentially localized by disorder. We establish emergence of dynamical thermalization, characterized as an ergodic chaotic dynamical state with a Gibbs distribution over the modes. Our results show that the fraction of thermalizing modes is finite and grows with the nonlinearity strength.