Strange scaling and relaxation of finite-size fluctuation in thermal equilibrium

Abstract

We numerically exhibit two strange phenomena of finite-size fluctuation in thermal equilibrium of a paradigmatic long-range interacting system having a second-order phase transition. One is a nonclassical finite-size scaling at the critical point, which differs from the prediction by statistical mechanics. With the aid of this strange scaling, the scaling theory for infinite-range models conjectures the nonclassical values of critical exponents for the correlation length. The other is relaxation of the fluctuation strength from one level to another in spite of being in thermal equilibrium. A scenario is proposed to explain these phenomena from the viewpoint of the Casimir invariants and their nonexactness in finite-size systems, where the Casimir invariants are conserved in the Vlasov dynamics describing the long-range interacting systems in the limit of large population. This scenario suggests appearance of the reported phenomena in a wide class of isolated long-range interacting systems.