Quantitative Rates of Convergence to Non-equilibrium Steady State for a Weakly Anharmonic Chain of Oscillators

We study a 1-dimensional chain of N weakly anharmonic classical oscillators coupled at its ends to heat baths at different temperatures. Each oscillator is subject to pinning potential and it also interacts with its nearest neighbors. In our set up both potentials are homogeneous and bounded (with N dependent bounds) perturbations of the harmonic ones. We show how a generalised version of Bakry–Emery theory can be adapted to this case of a hypoelliptic generator which is inspired by Baudoin (J Funct Anal 273(7):2275-2291, 2017). By that we prove exponential convergence to non-equilibrium steady state in Wasserstein–Kantorovich distance and in relative entropy with quantitative rates. We estimate the constants in the rate by solving a Lyapunov-type matrix equation and we obtain that the exponential rate, for the homogeneous chain, has order bigger than N - 3 . For the purely harmonic chain the order of the rate is in [ N - 3 , N - 1 ] . This shows that, in this set up, the spectral gap decays at most polynomially with N .