Equilibration and Thermalization of Classical Systems

Abstract

It is demonstrated that the canonical distribution for a subsystem of a closed system follows directly from the solution of the time-reversible Newtonian equation of motion in which the total energy is strictly conserved. It is shown that this conclusion holds for both integrable or nonintegrable systems even though the whole system may contain as little as a few thousand particles. In other words, we demonstrate that the canonical distribution holds for subsystems of experimentally relevant sizes and observation times.