The notion of persistence applied to breathers in thermal equilibrium

We study the thermal equilibrium of nonlinear Klein–Gordon chains at the limit of small coupling (anticontinuum limit). We show that the persistence distribution associated to the local energy density is a useful tool to study the statistical distribution of the so-called thermal breathers, mainly when the equilibrium is characterized by long-lived pinned excitations; in that case, the distribution of persistence intervals turns out to be a power law. We demonstrate also that this generic behaviour has a counterpart in the power spectra, where the high-frequencies domains nicely collapse if properly rescaled. These results are also compared to nonlinear Klein–Gordon chains with a soft nonlinearity, for which the thermal breathers are rather mobile entities. Finally, we discuss the possibility of a breather-induced anomalous diffusion law, and show that despite a strong slowing down of the energy diffusion, there are numerical evidences for a normal asymptotic diffusion mechanism, but with exceptionally small diffusion coefficients.