Glassy dynamics in disordered oscillator chains

Abstract

The escape of energy injected into one site in a disordered chain of nonlinear oscillators is examined numerically. When the disorder has a `fractal' pattern, the decay of the residual energy at the injection site can be fit to a stretched exponential with an exponent that varies continuously with the control parameter. At low temperature, we see evidence that energy can be trapped for an infinte time at the original site, i.e. classical many body localization.