Study of Chaos and Scaling in Classical SU(2) Gauge Theory

Abstract

Following a recent suggestion by Nielsen, Rugh, and Rugh, we study the energy scaling of the maximal Lyapunov exponent of classical Hamiltonian SU(2) lattice gauge theory. It is shown that the conjectured scaling behavior $λ_0\sim E^{1/4}$ at small energies on the lattice is a finite-time artifact. New numerical results for the maximal Lyapunov exponent are presented for lattices up to size $20^3$ and over two orders of magnitude in the energy per plaquette.