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# A Splitting Set Theorem for Epistemic Specifications

## Introduction

One of the most important areas in artificial intelligence is knowledge representation. Traditional logic programming has proven itself to be a powerful tool for knowledge representation. There are, however, limitations to the expressibility of traditional logic programming. In an attempt to overcome some of the these limitations, new logic programming formalisms were introduced. These new formalisms expand the traditional formalism by including disjunction (?), classical negation (?), or both (in the case of extended disjunctive logic programs)(?). These formalisms work well for certain classes of programs. Unfortunately, these formalisms do not always allow for the correct representation of incomplete information in the presence of multiple belief sets. As an attempt at solving this problem, the language of epistemic specifications was introduced (??). A good overview of each of the formalisms mentioned above can be found in (?).

As is usual with logic programming languages, the problem of answering queries is intractable in the general case. It is often useful, however, to find methods which simplify the query answering task for certain subclasses of programs. In (?), the usefulness of splitting sets for the investigation of answer sets was shown. In this paper we will present an extended definition of splitting sets that will be applicable to epistemic specifications. This in turn leads to an extension of the splitting set theorem from (?). As with EDLPs, there is a strong relationship between stratification and splitting sets. Using these ideas, we can develop an algorithmic method for computing world views of a subclass of epistemic logic programs.

An overview of the syntax and semantics of epistemic specifications is covered in Section 2. In Section 3 we present splitting sets for epistemic specifications and the main theorem of the paper, the splitting set theorem. Finally, Section 4 contains a discussion of stratification, how it is related to splitting sets, and an algorithm for computing world views of stratified programs which is based the splitting set theorem.

## Epistemic Specifications

The language of epistemic specifications is an extension of the language of extended disjunctive logic programs (EDLPs). In addition to the normal operators in EDLPs, the language of epistemic specifications also contains unary modal operators $`K`$ and $`M`$. $`K`$ should be read as “is known to be true” while $`M`$ is read as “may be believed to be true”. Atoms are defined in the usual way. Literals in the language of epistemic specifications are split into two types, objective literals and subjective literals. An objective literal is either an atom or an atom preceded by $`\neg `$ (classical negation). A subjective literal is an objective literal preceded by $`K`$, $`M`$, $`\neg K`$, or $`\neg M`$. Given an objective literal, $`L`$, we will refer to the set of four subjective literals that can be built from $`L`$ as $`SubLit(L)`$. Given a set of objective literals, $`U`$, $`SubLit(U)=\{X:LU`$ and $`XSubLit(L)\}`$.

### Syntax

The general form for rules in epistemic specifications is given in (?). In this paper we will restrict rules to the form:

$`F_1\text{or}\mathrm{}\text{or}F_nG_1,\mathrm{},G_k,\text{not}G_{k+1},\mathrm{},\text{not}G_m`$

where $`F_1,\mathrm{},F_n`$ are objective literals, $`G_1,\mathrm{},G_k`$ are either objective or subjective literals, and $`G_{k+1},\mathrm{},G_m`$ are objective literals. This form differs from the original only in the fact that in (?), $`G_{k+1},\mathrm{},G_m`$ were also allowed to be subjective literals. Notice however that for any subjective literal, $`G_i`$, the value of $`G_i`$ can never be unknown and hence $`\text{not}G_i`$ is always equivalent to $`\neg G_i`$. It can therefore easily be seen that the restricted form of rules above can be used without any loss of expressibility.

A collection of such rules will be referred to as an epistemic logic program or an epistemic specification. Given a rule, $`r`$,

* $`head(r)`$ refers to the the set of literals, $`\{F_1,\mathrm{},F_n\}`$ which occur in the head of the rule.
* $`pos(r)`$ refers to the set of all objective literals, $`L`$, such that either

+ $`L=G_i`$ for some $`1ik`$, or
    + $`G_iSubLit(L)`$ for some $`1ik`$.
* $`neg(r)`$ refers to the set of literals, $`\{G_{k+1},\mathrm{},G_m\}`$.
* $`lit(r)=head(r)pos(r)neg(r)`$.

Given a epistemic logic program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, $`Lit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ will denote the union of the sets $`lit(r)`$ for all $`r\mathrm{\Pi }`$.

### Semantics

We now move from the syntax of the language to the semantics. A rule with variables is considered to be a shorthand for the set of all ground instances of the rule. The truth or falsity of a literal in an epistemic logic program is determined by the world views of that program. A world view is a collection of sets of ground objective literals which satisfy certain properties. An objective literal, $`L`$, is true with respect to a collection of sets of literals, $`W`$, if it is true in each set in that collection (i.e. for each set $`AW`$, $`LA`$). If $`W`$ is a collection of sets of objective literals and $`L`$ is an objective literal then

* $`KL`$ is true with respect to $`W`$ (denoted $`WKL`$) iff for each set $`AW`$, $`LA`$,
* $`WML`$ iff there exists an $`AW`$ such that $`LA`$,
* $`W\neg KL`$ iff $`W\vDash ̸KL`$, and
* $`W\neg ML`$ iff $`W\vDash ̸ML`$.

A literal is true with respect to an epistemic logic program if it is true in every world view of that program. We will define the concept of a world view of an epistemic logic program in several steps.

First let us consider the case when $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is an epistemic logic program which does not contain $`not`$ and does not contain any subjective literals. A set of literals, $`A`$, is called a belief set of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ iff $`A`$ is a minimal set satisfying the following two conditions:

* For every rule $`F_1or\mathrm{}orF_nG_1,\mathrm{},G_k\mathrm{\Pi }`$ if $`G_1,\mathrm{},G_kA`$ then $`i,1in`$ such that $`F_iA`$,
* If $`A`$ contains a pair of contrary literals then $`A=Lit`$. (This belief set is called inconsistent.)

Next we consider an epistemic logic program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, which contains $`not`$ but does not contain subjective literals (such programs are extended disjunctive logic programs). For any such $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ and any set $`ALit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$, let $`\mathrm{\Pi }^A`$ be the program obtained from $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ by deleting

* each rule that contains $`notL`$ in its body where $`LA`$, and
* all formulas of the form $`notL`$ in the bodies of the remaining rules.

The resultant program $`\mathrm{\Pi }^A`$ does not contain $`not`$ or subjective literals and therefore its belief sets are as defined above. We will say a set, $`A`$, of literals is a belief set of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ if $`A`$ is a belief set of $`\mathrm{\Pi }^A`$.

Finally, let $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ be an arbitrary epistemic logic program. Let, $`W`$, be any collection of sets of literals from $`Lit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ and let $`\mathrm{\Pi }^W`$ be the program obtained by

* removing each rule which contains a subjective literal, $`L`$, where $`W\vDash ̸L`$, and
* removing all subjective literals from the bodies of the remaining rules.

Notice that $`\mathrm{\Pi }^W`$ does not contain subjective literals, therefore we can compute its belief sets as previously described. If $`W`$ is the set of all of the belief sets of $`\mathrm{\Pi }^W`$ then $`W`$ is a world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$.

We will say that a world view of an epistemic logic program is consistent if it does not contain a belief set consisting of all literals. We will say an epistemic logic program is consistent if it has at least one consistent non-empty world view.

Intuitively, a belief set is a set of literals that a rational agent may believe to be true. A world view is a set of belief sets that a rational agent may believe to be true with respect to that “world”.

The following give examples of epistemic logic programs and their world views.

###### Example 1

Let $`\mathrm{\Pi }_1`$ be the program which consists of the rules:

1. $`p(a)orp(b)`$
2. $`p(c)`$
3. $`q(d)`$
4. $`\neg p(X)\neg Mp(X)`$

The set

$$W=\{\{q(d),p(a),p(c),\neg p(d)\},\{q(d),p(b),p(c),\neg p(d)\}\}$$

consisting of two belief sets, can be shown to be the only world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_1`$.

###### Example 2

For the next example, consider the program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }_2`$, consisting of the following two rules:

1. $`p(a)\neg Mq(a)`$
2. $`q(a)\neg Mp(a)`$

It can be seen that $`\mathrm{\Pi }_2`$ has two world views: $`W_1=\{\{q(a)\}\}`$ and $`W_2=\{\{p(a)\}\}`$.

###### Example 3

As a final example, consider the program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }_3`$ consisting of only one rule,

$$p(a)\neg Kp(a).$$

It can be shown that this program does not have a world view.

In general, to find the world view of a epistemic logic program one must either try all possible collections of sets of literals or guess. It is infeasible to try all combinations since, even for the case where the number of ground literals, $`n`$, is finite, there are $`2^{2^n}`$ possibilities. A guess-and-check method could possibly be used to find world views but the problem is how to create an algorithm which would make good “educated” guesses and would know when and if it has found all the of the world views.

In this paper, we are primarily interested in presenting a means of computing world views. As a first step in achieving this goal, we will limit ourselves to programs which have at most a finite number of world views. For the remainder of this paper we will only consider epistemic logic programs which do not contain function symbols and have a finite number of constants and predicate symbols.

## Splitting Sets

In this section we will present a definition of splitting sets of epistemic logic programs. The definition is an extension of the definition in (?). We will also present a version of the splitting set theorem that is applicable to epistemic logic programs.

###### Definition 1 (Splitting Set)

A set, $`U`$, of objective literals is a splitting set of a epistemic logic program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, iff

* for every rule $`r\mathrm{\Pi }`$, if $`head(r)U0`$ then $`lit(r)U`$, and,
* if $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ contains $`K`$ or $`M`$, then for any objective literal, $`plit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$, if $`pU`$ then $`\overline{p}U`$.

If $`U`$ is a splitting set of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, we also say that $`U`$ splits $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$. The set of all rules $`r\mathrm{\Pi }`$ such that $`lit(r)U`$ is denoted by $`b_U(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ and is called the bottom of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ with respect to $`U`$. The set $`\mathrm{\Pi }\backslash b_U(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ is called the top of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ with respect to $`U`$.

Using a splitting set, one can break the computation of a world view of an epistemic specification into two parts, a bottom and a top. The basic idea is to first compute the world view of the bottom of the program. The world view of the top can then be computed, taking into consideration the what was already computed for the bottom. Finally the two parts are merged together to get the world view of the complete program.

The world view of the bottom can be computed without regard to the top since no literal which occurs in the head of a rule of the top can occur anywhere in the bottom. When computing the world view for the top however, one needs to take the world view of the bottom into consideration. The world view of the bottom of the program can be used to “reduce” the top of the program. We can remove from the top those rules which cannot be satisfied because the value of a literal computed in the bottom makes their bodies false. From the remaining rules one can remove the portions of the bodies of the rules that were determined to be true. The reduction is performed in two steps; one for subjective literals and one for objective ones.

To remove subjective literals we will introduce the idea of a restricted reduct.

###### Definition 2 (Restricted Reduct)

Let $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ be an
epistemic logic program, $`W`$ be a collection of sets of literals, and $`U`$ be a set of literals. The restricted reduct is the program obtained from $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ by:

1. removing from $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ all rules containing subjective formulae $`G`$ where $`GSubLit(U)`$ and $`W\vDash ̸G`$.
2. removing all other occurrences of subjective formula $`G`$ where $`GSubLit(U)`$.

The resultant program will be denoted by $`\mathrm{\Pi }^{r(U,W)}`$ and be referred to as the reduct of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ with respect to $`W`$, restricted by $`U`$.

In our intended use, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, would be the top of a program, $`U`$, would be the set used to split the program, and $`W`$ would be the world view of the bottom.

The following is an example of a restricted reduct.

###### Example 4

| Let | $`W=`$ | $`\{\{a,\neg b,d\},\{a,\neg d\}\}`$, |
| --- | --- | --- |
| $`U=`$ | $`\{a,\neg a,b,\neg b,c,\neg c\}`$, and |
| $`\mathrm{\Pi }=`$ | $`ea,M\neg b,f`$ |
| $`gKa,h`$ |
| $`iMc`$ |
| $`jKd,k`$ |
| then | $`\mathrm{\Pi }^{r(U,W)}=`$ | $`ea,f`$ |
| $`gh`$ |

Next we consider objective literals. Recall that the world view of the bottom of a program is in essence a set of belief sets, all of which are different. Because of this, the truth or falsity of the objective literals in the bodies of rules of the top may vary with respect to each belief set. Due to this fact, after performing the reduction described below, rather than being left with a single program, we have, in general, a different partially evaluated top for each belief set of the bottom.

###### Definition 3 (Partial Evaluation)

Given two sets of objective literals, $`U`$ and $`X`$, and an epistemic specification, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, for which none of the literals from $`U`$ or $`X`$ occur subjectively in its rules, then $`e_U(\mathrm{\Pi },X)=\{r^{}`$: $``$ rule $`r\mathrm{\Pi }`$ such that $`pos(r)UX`$ and $`neg(r)U`$ is disjoint from $`X`$, $`r^{}`$ is the rule which results from removing each sub-formula of the form $`L`$ or $`\text{not}L`$ from $`r`$, where $`LU\}`$. We refer to $`e_U(\mathrm{\Pi },X)`$ as the partial evaluation of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ with respect to $`X`$.

Here again, in our intended use $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ would be the top of the program, $`U`$ would be the splitting set used, and $`X`$ would be one of belief sets from the world view of the bottom.

As was mentioned above, after taking the restricted reduct of the top and then finding the partial evaluation of the result with respect to each of the belief sets of the bottom, we are often left with multiple “tops”. We cannot simply take the world view of each “top” and merge them together. The reason for this is that it does not guarantee that the truth of subjective literals in the merged world view are the same as they were in each “top”. To handle this problem we introduce the idea of a multi-view.

###### Definition 4 (Multi-view)

Given epistemic logic
programs $`\mathrm{\Pi }_1,\mathrm{},\mathrm{\Pi }_n`$, then a collection of sets of objective literals, $`W`$, is a multi-view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_1,\mathrm{},\mathrm{\Pi }_n`$ iff

1. $`W=(_{i=1}^nans(\mathrm{\Pi }_i^W))\backslash \{Lit\}`$ ( if $`i`$ s.t. $`ans(\mathrm{\Pi }_i^W)`$ is consistent)
2. $`W=\{\{Lit\}\}`$ (otherwise)

A multi-view, $`W`$, is consistent iff $`W\{\{Lit\}\}`$. For each $`\mathrm{\Pi }_i`$, the set of all belief sets of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_i^W`$ is called the restricted view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_i`$ with respect to W.

Here a simple example of a multi-view.

###### Example 5

|  |  |  | If | $`\mathrm{\Pi }_1=`$ | $`a`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`b`$ |
| $`cKb`$ |
|  | and | $`\mathrm{\Pi }_2=`$ | $`a`$ |
| $`cKb`$ |

then $`\mathrm{\Pi }_1,\mathrm{\Pi }_2`$ has only one multi-view, {{a, b},{a}}.

Before we present the main theorem of the paper we must first present a new notation and a definition. Given a collection of sets of objective literals, $`W`$, and a set of literals, $`U`$, then

$$W|_U=\{X:W_iW,X=W_iU\}.$$

###### Definition 5 (Safe)

Given an Epistemic Specification $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ with splitting set $`U`$ such that $`\mathrm{\Pi }_U=b_U(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ and $`\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}=\mathrm{\Pi }\backslash \mathrm{\Pi }_U`$, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is said to be safe with respect to U iff $`W=\{W_1,\mathrm{},W_n\}`$ if $`\{W_1|_U,\mathrm{},W_n|_U\}ans(\mathrm{\Pi }_U^W)`$ then $`Aans(\mathrm{\Pi }_U^W):(e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^W,A))`$ is consistent.

###### Theorem 1

Let $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ be an epistemic specification, $`U`$ be a splitting set of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ such that $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is safe with respect to $`U`$. If we denote $`b_U(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ as $`\mathrm{\Pi }_U`$, and $`\mathrm{\Pi }\backslash \mathrm{\Pi }_U`$ as $`\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}`$ then:

1. If

$$X=\{X_1,\mathrm{},X_n\}$$

is a consistent world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_U`$ and $`Y`$ is a consistent multi-view of

$$(e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^{r(U,X)},X_1),\mathrm{},e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^{r(U,X)},X_n))$$

then if $`W=\{W_i:W_i=X_jY_k`$, where $`X_jX,Y_kans((e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^{r(U,X)},X_j))^Y)`$ and $`X_jY_k`$ is consistent $`\}\{\}`$ then $`W`$ is a consistent world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$.
2. If $`W`$ is a consistent world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ then $`X,Y`$ such that $`X`$ is a world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_U`$, $`Y`$ is a multi-view of

$$(e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^{r(U,X)},X_1),\mathrm{},e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^{r(U,X)},X_n))$$

and

$$W_iW(W_i|_UX$$

and

$$W_i|_{\overline{U}}ans((e_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{U}}^{r(U,X)},W_i|_U))^Y)$$

In the above theorem we require that the splitting set be safe with respect to the program. As we will show, this restriction is important. If one or more or the belief sets of the bottom does not have a consistent extension to the top, the value of subjective literals defined in the bottom may change. In this case, the above method may not compute a correct world view.

###### Example 6

Consider the program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }_4`$, with the following rules:

1. $`p(a)orp(b)`$
2. $`p(c)Mp(b)`$
3. $`p(d)p(b)`$
4. $`\neg p(d)p(b)`$

If we split the program using

$$U=\{p(a),\neg p(a),p(b),\neg p(b),p(c),\neg p(c)\}$$

as a splitting set, then $`b_U(\mathrm{\Pi }_4)`$, which consists of rules 1 and 2, has one world view which contains 2 belief sets, $`\{p(a),p(c)\}`$ and $`\{p(b),p(c)\}`$. With respect to the belief set $`\{p(b),p(c)\}`$, however, the top of the program is inconsistent. Using the method from the theorem above, not requiring the program be safe, we get one “world view”: $`\{\{p(a),p(c)\}\}`$. It can easily be seen however, that this is not a world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_4`$. The only world view of the program is $`\{\{p(a)\}\}`$.

The error occurred because, since $`p(b)`$ was “possible” in the world view the bottom we concluded $`p(c)`$ was therefore true even though we later find that $`p(b)`$ is no longer “possible” after the computation of the top.

As can be seen from the definition, determining if a splitting set of a program is safe may be as difficult as finding the world views. We will give a property which is more intuitive and easier to check. While it is less general, it is reasonable and encompasses a large number of interesting programs. Before we present the condition, we must first define satisfies.

###### Definition 6 (Satisfies)

Given a program $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ and a collection of sets of literals from $`Lit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$, denoted $`W`$, then we will say $`W`$ satisfies the body of a rule, $`r\mathrm{\Pi }`$, if each literal in the body is true with respect to $`W`$. We say $`W`$ satisfies $`r`$ if either $`W`$ does not satisfy the body of $`r`$ or at least one literal in the head of $`r`$ is true with respect to $`W`$.

We now present the property.

###### Definition 7 (Guarded)

We will say that a program $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is guarded with respect to a splitting set $`U`$ if

* $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ does not contain subjective literals, or
* for every pair of rules $`R_1,R_2\mathrm{\Pi }\backslash b_U(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ and for every collection of sets of literals from $`Lit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$, denoted as $`W`$, if $`head(R_1)`$ and $`head(R_2)`$ contain contrary literals and $`W`$ satisfies all of the rules in $`b_U(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ then either $`W`$ does not satisfy the body of $`R_1`$ or $`W`$ does not satisfy the body of $`R_2`$. Note that a rule with an empty head can be rewritten as a rule which has the predicate $`\neg true`$ as the head and by adding the rule

$$true$$

to the program. A program containing rules with empty heads is guarded with respect to $`U`$ if the program rewritten without such rules is.

It can be shown that, given any program $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ with splitting set $`U`$, if $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is guarded with respect to $`U`$ then $`U`$ is safe with respect to $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$.

## Splitting and Stratification

In this section we will give a definition of stratification for epistemic logic programs, show how it relates to splitting sets, and illustrate how the splitting set theorem can be used to simplify the computation of the world view of a stratified epistemic logic program. We will start out with the definition of stratification.

###### Definition 8 (Stratification)

A partitioning

$$\pi _0,\mathrm{},\pi _z$$

of the set of all literals of an epistemic logic program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, is a stratification of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, if for any literal, $`L_1\pi _i`$, then

$$\neg L_1\pi _i$$

and for any other literal $`L_2`$ in $`Lit(\mathrm{\Pi })`$ and any rule $`r\mathrm{\Pi }`$:

* if $`L_1,L_2head(r)`$ then $`L_2\pi _i`$.
* if $`L_1head(r)`$ and $`L_2`$ occurs objectively in $`pos(r)`$ then there exists an $`ji`$ such that $`L_2\pi _j`$.
* if $`L_1head(r)`$ and $`L_2neg(r)`$ or $`L_2`$ occurs subjectively in $`r`$, then there exists $`j<i`$ such that $`L_2\pi _j`$.

This stratification of the literals defines a stratification of the rules of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ to strata $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0,\mathrm{},\mathrm{\Pi }_k`$ where a strata $`\mathrm{\Pi }_i`$ contains all of the rules of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ whose heads consists of literal from $`\pi _i`$. A program is called stratified if it has a stratification.

It can easily be seen that, given a stratified epistemic logic program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, with stratification $`\pi _0,\mathrm{},\pi _z`$, the set of literal $`U_i`$ such that

$$U_i=\underset{j=1}{\overset{i}{}}\pi _j$$

is a splitting set of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$. With each stratified epistemic logic program we will then associate a sequence $`U_0,\mathrm{},U_z`$ of splitting sets formed as described.

This leads us to an algorithm for computing the world view a safe, stratified epistemic specification. Given an epistemic specification, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, with stratification $`\pi _0,\mathrm{},\pi _n`$ and associated splitting sets $`U_0,\mathrm{},U_n`$, such that $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is safe with respect to $`\{\}`$ and each $`U_i`$, we can compute the world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ as follows:

1. Using the splitting set theorem, compute the world view, $`W_1`$, of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0\mathrm{\Pi }_1`$ with splitting set $`U_0`$. Note that $`b_{U_0}=\mathrm{\Pi }_0`$ and, by the definition of stratification, it does not contain $`not`$ or any subjective literals. $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0`$ is also safe with respect to $`\{\}`$. From these two facts, it can be seen that $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0`$ has a unique, consistent, world view which consists of all the belief sets of the EDLP $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0`$.
2. Given the world view, $`W_{i1}`$, of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0\mathrm{}\mathrm{\Pi }_{i1}`$, the world view, $`W_i`$, of $`\mathrm{\Pi }_0\mathrm{}\mathrm{\Pi }_i`$ can be computed using the splitting set theorem with the splitting set $`U_{i1}`$.

Notice that $`W_n`$ is the world view of $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$. It can be seen from the definition of stratification that, in each step of the algorithm above, when we take the restricted reduct of the top of program we are left with a program which does not contain subjective literals. The multi-view is therefore simply the union of the world views obtained by taking the restricted reduct of the top and partially evaluating with respect to one of the belief sets of the world view of the bottom. To compute the world view of a safe, stratified, epistemic logic program therefore, one only needs to be able to compute the belief sets of extended disjunctive logic programs.

The following theorem, which is a slightly modified version of a theorem from (?), also follows from the results above.

###### Theorem 2

Given any stratified, epistemic logic program, $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$, which is safe with respect to $`\{\}`$ as well as each of the splitting sets associated with its stratification, the program $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ has a unique, consistent, world view.

## Conclusion

In this paper, we expanded the results from (?) to include epistemic logic programs. We also presented definitions of what it means for a epistemic logic program to be safe, guarded, and stratified. This led to an algorithmic method for computing world views of a subclass of epistemic logic programs.

It should be noted that the belief sets of an extended disjunctive logic program are simply the answer sets (?) of that program. Recently, there have been considerable advances in the computation of such answer sets. One such system which shows great promise is DLV (?). Using their system and the results in this paper, it should be a reasonable task to create a inference engine for the subclass of epistemic logic programs mentioned here.

As this paper is meant to form a basis for the computation of world views, we restricted ourselves to epistemic logic programs with a finite number of finite world views. We believe that the theorem presented here can be expanded to cover programs with an infinite number of infinite world views.

## Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michael Gelfond and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.


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# Propagation of entangled light pulses through dispersing and absorbing channels

## I Introduction

Quantum-state entanglement of spatially separated systems is one of the most exciting features of quantum mechanics . In particular in the rapidly developing field of quantum information processing (quantum teleportation , quantum cryptography , and quantum computing ), entanglement has been a subject of intense studies. Recently, continuous-variable systems have been of increasing interest .

Since entanglement is a highly nonclassical property, it is expected to respond very sensitively to environment influences, and thus it can decrease very fast. The mechanisms of decoherence are worth to be studied in detail , because they delimit possible applications. In particular, optical pulses prepared in entangled states typically propagate through optical fibers and/or pass optical instruments, such as beam splitters, mirrors, and interferometers. All these devices are built up by (dielectric) matter that always gives rise to some dispersion and absorption. As a result, the initially prepared quantum coherence is destroyed, and the question arises of what is the characteristic scale of quantum decorrelation.

In this paper the quantum decorrelation of two initially entangled light pulses that pass through optical devices is studied. The pulses are regarded as being nonmonochromatic modes of arbitrary shape, and the devices are regarded as being dispersing and absorbing four-port devices of arbitrary frequency response. The underlying theory of quantum state transformation has been developed recently . It is based on a quantization procedure for the electromagnetic field in dispersing and absorbing inhomogeneous dielectrics , which is consistent with both the dissipation-fluctuation theorem and the QED canonical (equal-time) commutation relations. One interesting aspect of the theory is that given the complex refractive-index profiles  of the devices, which can be determined experimentally, the parameters relevant to the quantum-state transformation can be calculated without further assumptions.

In Section II the basic relations for describing the pulse propagation and the associated quantum-state transformation are given for the case when the pulses are initially prepared in a two-mode squeezed vacuum state. The fidelity and some characteristic measures of (quantum) correlations of the pulses are calculated and discussed in Section III, and some concluding remarks are given in Section IV.

## II Pulse propagation and quantum-state transformation

Let us consider the propagation of two nonclassical light pulses through lossy four-port devices of given complex refractive-index profiles . Regarding the pulses as nonmonochromatic modes, we may define annihilation operators for the two pulses in terms of the annihilation operators associated with the monochromatic modes that form the pulses ,

$`\widehat{a}[\eta ]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\omega \eta ^{}(\omega )\widehat{a}(\omega ),`$ (1)
$`\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\omega \stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}(\omega )\widehat{d}(\omega ),`$ (2)
where $`\eta (\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{\eta }(\omega )`$ are normalized functions that describe the pulse profiles,

$`\eta ^2(\eta |\eta )`$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\omega \eta ^{}(\omega )\eta (\omega )=1,`$ (3)
$`\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{\eta })`$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\omega \stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}(\omega )\stackrel{~}{\eta }(\omega )=1.`$ (4)
Using the continuous-mode bosonic commutation relations

$$[\widehat{a}(\omega ),\widehat{a}^{}(\omega ^{})]=\delta (\omega \omega ^{})=[\widehat{d}(\omega ),\widehat{d}^{}(\omega ^{})]$$
(5)
(the other commutators being zero), it follows that

$$[\widehat{a}[\eta ],\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]]=1=[\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }],\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]].$$
(6)
Now let us assume that the pulses are initially prepared in an entangled quantum state of the type of a two-mode squeezed vacuum state

$$|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{in}}=\mathrm{exp}\{q^{}\widehat{a}[\eta ]\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.\}|0\widehat{S}\left(q\right)|0,$$
(7)
with $`q=|q|e^{i\phi _q}`$ being the squeezing parameter. Most studies of continuous-variable systems in quantum information processing have been based on such states . After having passed the devices, the output state of the pulses reads as

$$|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{out}}=\mathrm{exp}\{q^{}\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.\}|0\widehat{S}^{}(q)|0,$$
(8)
where

$`\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\omega \eta ^{}(\omega )\widehat{a}^{}(\omega ),`$ (9)
$`\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\omega \stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}(\omega )\widehat{d}^{}(\omega ),`$ (10)
and the continuous-mode operators $`\widehat{a}^{}(\omega )`$ and $`\widehat{d}^{}(\omega )`$ are given by

$`\widehat{a}^{}(\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{2}{}}}\left[T_{i1}^{}(\omega )\widehat{a}_i(\omega )+F_{i1}^{}(\omega )\widehat{g}_i(\omega )\right],`$ (11)
$`\widehat{d}^{}(\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{2}{}}}\left[\stackrel{~}{T}_{i1}^{}(\omega )\widehat{d}_i(\omega )+\stackrel{~}{F}_{i1}^{}(\omega )\widehat{h}_i(\omega )\right]`$ (12)
\[see A, equation (A5)\]. In equations (11), (12) the continuous-mode operators $`\widehat{a}_1(\omega )\widehat{a}(\omega )`$ and $`\widehat{d}_1(\omega )\widehat{d}(\omega )`$ belong to the fields entering the first input ports of the two four-port devices, whereas $`\widehat{a}_2(\omega )`$ and $`\widehat{d}_2(\omega )`$ belong to the fields entering the second input ports, and the bosonic operators $`\widehat{g}_i(\omega )`$ and $`\widehat{h}_i(\omega )`$ describe excitations of the two devices. The quantities $`T_{11}(\omega )T(\omega )`$, $`\stackrel{~}{T}_{11}(\omega )\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ and $`T_{21}(\omega )R(\omega )`$, $`\stackrel{~}{T}_{21}(\omega )\stackrel{~}{R}(\omega )`$ are respectively the transmission and reflection coefficients of the four-port devices with respect to the incoming fields at the first input ports. In what follows we assume that the second input ports of the devices are unused, that is, the fields there are in the vacuum state, the corresponding variables together with the device variables being referred to as the environment $``$. Moreover, we assume that the devices are not excited.

It is convenient to represent each of the operators $`\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]`$ and $`\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]`$ in equations (9), (10) as a sum of two other independent bosonic operators,

$`\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]`$ $`=`$ $`T\eta \widehat{a}[\eta ^{}]+(1T\eta ^2)^{1/2}\widehat{q}_\eta ,`$ (13)
$`\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}]+(1\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2)^{1/2}\widehat{p}_{\stackrel{~}{\eta }},`$ (14)
where $`\eta ^{}(\omega )=T(\omega )\eta (\omega )/T\eta `$ and $`\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}(\omega )=\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )\stackrel{~}{\eta }(\omega )/\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }`$. Note that the operators $`\widehat{q}_\eta `$ and $`\widehat{p}_{\stackrel{~}{\eta }}`$ belong to the environment $``$,

$`(1T\eta ^2)^{1/2}\widehat{q}_\eta `$ $`=`$ $`\widehat{a}_2[R\eta ]+{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{2}{}}}\widehat{g}_i[F_{i1}\eta ],`$ (15)
$`(1\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2)^{1/2}\widehat{p}_{\stackrel{~}{\eta }}`$ $`=`$ $`\widehat{d}_2\left[\stackrel{~}{R}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\right]+{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{2}{}}}\widehat{h}_i\left[\stackrel{~}{F}_{i1}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\right].`$ (16)
Given the output quantum state $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{out}}`$ of the system, the (symmetric) characteristic function

$$\mathrm{\Phi }_{\mathrm{out}}(\alpha ,\beta )=\mathrm{exp}(\alpha \widehat{a}^{}[\eta ^{}]+\beta \widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}]\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.)_{\mathrm{out}}$$
(17)
can be calculated. In B it is shown that

$`\mathrm{\Phi }_{\mathrm{out}}(\alpha ,\beta )=\mathrm{exp}\{\frac{1}{2}\left(\right|\alpha |^2[1+(\mathrm{cosh}2|q|1)T\eta ^2]`$ (20)
$`+\left|\beta |^2[1+(\mathrm{cosh}2|q|1)\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2]\right)`$
$`\frac{1}{2}(\alpha \beta e^{i\phi _q}\mathrm{sinh}2|q|+\alpha ^{}\beta ^{}e^{i\phi _q}\mathrm{sinh}2|q|)T\eta \stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\}.`$
Note that $`\mathrm{\Phi }_{\mathrm{out}}(\alpha ,\beta )`$ is a function only of the moduli $`|T(\omega )|`$ and $`|\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )|`$ of the transmission coefficients. For $`T(\omega )=\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )=1`$, the characteristic function of the incoming fields is recognized.

## III Pulse correlations

A measure of the entanglement of two subsystems $`(A)`$ and $`(B)`$ of a composed system $`(AB)`$ that is prepared in some mixed state $`\widehat{\varrho }`$ is the quantum relative entropy $`E`$ , the quantum analog of the classical Kullback-Leibler entropy,

$`E(\widehat{\varrho })=\underset{\widehat{\sigma }ϵ𝒮}{\mathrm{min}}\mathrm{Tr}[\widehat{\varrho }(\mathrm{ln}\widehat{\varrho }\mathrm{ln}\widehat{\sigma })],`$ (21)
where $`𝒮`$ is the set of all separable quantum states the composed system can be prepared in. For pure states, $`\widehat{\varrho }`$ $`=`$ $`|\mathrm{\Psi }\mathrm{\Psi }|`$, the entanglement measure (21) reduces to the von Neumann entropy of one subsystem

$`E(\widehat{\varrho })=S_A=\mathrm{Tr}^{(A)}\left(\widehat{\varrho }^{(A)}\mathrm{ln}\widehat{\varrho }^{(A)}\right)=S_B,\widehat{\varrho }^{(A)}=\mathrm{Tr}^{(B)}\widehat{\varrho }`$ (22)
\[Tr(A) (Tr(B)), trace with respect to the subsystem A (B)\]. In the case where $`|\mathrm{\Psi }`$ is the two-mode squeezed vacuum state (7) it follows that

$`E(\widehat{\varrho })=S_{\mathrm{th}}(\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}})=(\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}+1)\mathrm{ln}(\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}+1)\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}\mathrm{ln}\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}},`$ (23)
with $`\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}=\mathrm{sinh}^2|q|`$ being the mean number of photons in each mode. Hence, the entanglement is given by the von Neumann entropy of a thermal state of mean photon number $`\overline{n}=\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}`$. Note that for large mean photon numbers the entanglement increases linearly with the squeezing parameter, $`E\mathrm{ln}\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}4|q|`$.

Unfortunately, there has been no explicit expression for calculating the entanglement measure (21) of mixed states, which are typically observed in noisy systems. Extensive numerical procedures would be indispensable in general, which dramatically grow up with increasing dimension of the Hilbert space . Therefore some other correlation measures have been introduced. Although they are not purely quantum correlation measures \[as is the entanglement measure (21)\], they may be very helpful to gain insight into the problem of degradation of quantum correlations.

### A Fidelity

Fidelity can be regarded as being a measure of how close to each other are two (system) states in the corresponding Hilbert space. Fidelities have been used, e.g., to describe decoherence effects in the transmission of quantum information through noisy channels  and to characterize the quality of quantum teleportation .

When $`\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}=|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{in}}\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{in}}|`$ and $`\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}=|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{out}}\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{out}}|`$ are respectively the input and the output density operators of the overall system (composed of the two pulses and the environment), then the density operators of the incoming and outgoing fields are respectively

$$\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}^{(a,d)}=\mathrm{Tr}^{()}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}$$
(24)
and

$$\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}=\mathrm{Tr}^{()}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}},$$
(25)
(Tr(E), trace with respect to the environment). Following c, the fidelity

$$F_e=\mathrm{Tr}\left(\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}^{(a,d)}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}\right)$$
(26)
can be defined. In C it is shown that applying the quantum state transformation outlined in Section II leads to

$`F_e=|1+[1(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })]\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}|^2.`$ (27)
Note that $`F_e`$ in equation (27) refers to the transmitted light. Replacing $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ with $`R(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{R}(\omega )`$ respectively, the fidelity with respect to the reflected fields is obtained. From equation (27) it is seen that the fidelity sensitively depends on the spectral overlaps of the transmitted and the incoming pulses, and these overlaps are substantially determined by the dependence on frequency of the transmission coefficients $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ (cf. Fig. 4). It is worth noting that the fidelity decreases rapidly with increasing initial mean photon number, that is, with increasing initial squeezing and thus increasing initial entanglement.

To illustrate the effect, $`F_e`$ is shown in Fig. 1 as a function of the product of the overlaps $`(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })`$ for different values of the squeezing parameter $`|q|`$. In the figure $`(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })`$ is assumed to be real. If the phases of $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ did not depend on $`\omega `$, then real $`(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })`$ would correspond to the maximally attainable fidelity (which could be also called entanglement fidelity ).

In quantum teleportation a strongly entangled two-mode squeezed vacuum is desired. Since in this case the photon number must be large, the state should tend to a macroscopic (at least mesoscopic) state, and hence its nonclassical features can become extremely unstable. Clearly, in the case of discrete-variable systems the entanglement must not necessarily increase with the mean photon number. For example, in the case of a two-mode state of the type

$$|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{in}}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+|\lambda |^2}}\left(|00+\lambda |nn\right)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+|\lambda |^2}}\left[1+\lambda \frac{\left(\widehat{a}[\eta ]\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }]\right)^n}{n!}\right]|0,$$
(28)
the entanglement is

$$E=\frac{S_{\mathrm{th}}(|\lambda |^2)}{1+|\lambda |^2},$$
(29)
whereas the mean photon number in one mode is $`\overline{n}=n|\lambda |^2/(1+|\lambda |^2)`$. The entanglement attains its maximal value $`E=\mathrm{ln}2`$ at $`|\lambda |=1`$, which corresponds to a Bell-type state. Nevertheless, when $`\overline{n}`$ becomes large the entanglement of the transmitted field decreases exponentially with $`\overline{n}`$ . A similar behaviour is observed for the fidelity. Using the results in Ref. , the fidelity (with respect to the transmitted fields) is obtained to be

$`F_e={\displaystyle \frac{1}{(1+|\lambda |^2)^2}}\left[\right|1+|\lambda |^2(\eta |T\eta )^n(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })^n|^2`$ (31)
$`+|\lambda |^2(1T\eta ^2)^n(1\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2)^n].`$
It is seen that with increasing value of $`n`$ the fidelity rapidly decreases to the minimal value, i.e., $`F_e=0.5`$ for $`|\lambda |=1`$.

### B Entropic correlation measures

Correlation measures can be defined employing the von Neumann entropy. A very general correlation measure is the index of correlation

$$I_c=S_a+S_dS_{ad},$$
(32)
where

$$S_{ad}=\mathrm{Tr}\left(\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}\mathrm{ln}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}\right)$$
(33)
is the entropy of the two-pulse system, and

$$S_m=\mathrm{Tr}\left(\widehat{\rho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(m)}\mathrm{ln}\widehat{\rho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(m)}\right)$$
(34)
($`m=a,d`$) are the entropies of the single-pulse systems,

$$\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a)}=\mathrm{Tr}^{(d)}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)},\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(d)}=\mathrm{Tr}^{(a)}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}.$$
(35)
Note that $`I_c`$ is bounded from below by $`|S_aS_d|`$ and from above by $`S_a`$ $`+`$ $`S_d`$. Further, $`I_c`$ is an upper bound of the entanglement, $`EI_c`$, because $`\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a)}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(d)}`$ is an element of the set of separable states $`𝒮`$ of the two-pulse system.

Correlation measures that can be used to formulate criteria of nonclassical correlation are

$`I_e^{(m)}=S_mS_{ad}`$ (36)
($`m=a,d`$). Since the entropy of a classical system must not be less than the entropy of one of its subsystems, positive values of $`I_e^{(m)}`$ indicate nonclassical correlation. Thus, positive values of $`I_e^{(a)}`$ and/or $`I_e^{(b)}`$ may be regarded as indicating entanglement.

As can be seen from equation (20), the characteristic function of $`\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}`$ is of Gaussian type. The same is true for the characteristic function of $`\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a)}`$ and $`\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(d)}`$, which follows from equation (20) for $`\beta =0`$ and $`\alpha =0`$ respectively. Hence, the entropies $`S_m`$, equation (34), and \[after diagonalizing the quadratic form in the exponent in equation (20)\] the entropy $`S_{ad}`$, equation (33), can be obtained analytically in the form of the entropy of thermal states:

$$S_a=S_{\mathrm{th}}(n_a),n_a=T\eta ^2\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}},$$
(37)
$$S_d=S_{\mathrm{th}}(n_d),n_d=\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}},$$
(38)
$$S_{ad}=S_{\mathrm{th}}(n_{ad}),n_{ad}=(1T\eta ^2\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2)\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}.$$
(39)
Equations (37) – (39) again reveal the typical dependence on the spectral overlaps of the transmitted and the incoming pulses, the overlaps being substantially determined by the frequency response of the devices. Note that only the absolute values of $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ appear. Obviously, the entropies of the reflected light are obtained by replacing $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ with $`R\left(\omega \right)`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{R}\left(\omega \right)`$ respectively.

Examples of the entropy $`S_{ad}`$ and the correlation indices $`I_c`$ and $`I_e^{(m)}`$ as functions of $`T\eta ^2`$ are shown in Fig. 2 for $`\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2=1`$ (that is, only one channel is noisy). It is seen that for not too small values of $`T\eta ^2`$ both $`I_e^{(a)}`$ and $`I_e^{(d)}`$ are positive and thus indicate entanglement. With decreasing value of $`T\eta ^2`$ they decrease in a similar way as $`I_c`$. Whereas $`I_e^{(a)}`$ referring to the noise channel becomes negative and thus attains classically allowed values, $`I_e^{(d)}`$ referring to the unperturbed channel remains always positive but becomes small. The results are in agreement with the Peres-Horodecki separability criterion for bipartite Gaussian quantum states . It tells us that in the low-temperature limit the two-pulse system under consideration remains inseparable for all values of $`T\eta ^2`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2`$ (cf. ). In order to get insight into the influence of the initial mean photon number $`\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}=\mathrm{sinh}^2|q|`$ on the degradation of the quantum correlation, we have plotted in Fig. 3 the dependence on $`T\eta ^2`$ of the correlation indices $`I_e^{(a)}`$ and $`I_e^{(d)}`$ for different values of $`|q|`$. It is clearly seen that the larger $`\overline{n}_{\mathrm{sq}}`$ becomes, the faster $`I_e^{(a)}`$ and $`I_e^{(d)}`$ decrease.

### C Example: absorbing dielectric plate

The values of $`(\eta |T\eta )`$, $`(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })`$, and $`T\eta ^2`$, $`\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2`$ depend on the chosen pulse forms and on the dependence on frequency of the transmission coefficients of the devices $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$. When the bandwidths of the pulses are sufficiently small, so that the variation of $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ within the pulse bandwidths can be disregarded, then $`T(\omega )`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )`$ can be taken at the mid-frequencies $`\omega _f`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{\omega }_f`$ of the pulse, i.e., $`(\eta |T_{ij}\eta )T_{ij}(\omega _f)`$ and $`(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}_{ij}\stackrel{~}{\eta })\stackrel{~}{T}_{ij}(\stackrel{~}{\omega }_f)`$. In this case, the results become independent of the pulse shape and solely reflect the effect of the devices.

Let us again consider the case where one pulse passes through free space and assume that the other pulse passes through a dielectric plate whose complex (Lorentz-type) permittivity is given by

$$ϵ=1+\frac{ϵ_\mathrm{s}1}{1(\omega /\omega _0)^22i\gamma \omega /\omega _0^2}.$$
(40)
Explicit expressions for the transmission coefficient $`T(\omega )`$ and the reflection coefficient $`R(\omega )`$ of such a device are given in Ref. . In Figs. 4($`a`$) and ($`b`$) they are shown as functions of $`\omega `$ for $`ϵ_\mathrm{s}`$ $`=`$ $`1.5`$, $`\gamma /\omega _0`$ $`=`$ $`0.01`$, and plate thickness $`2c/\omega _0`$. Typically, the transmission amplitude shows a dip near the medium resonance $`\omega _0`$, whereas the reflection is peaked there. In Figs. 4($`c`$) and ($`d`$), the fidelities $`F_e`$ of the transmitted and reflected fields are shown as functions of $`\omega _f`$. Finally, Figs. 4($`e`$) – ($`h`$) show the dependence on $`\omega _f`$ of the corresponding correlation indices $`I_e^{(m)}`$. In particular, it is seen that for transmission $`F_e`$ and $`I_e^{(m)}`$ are strongly reduced near the medium resonance, $`\omega _f\omega _0`$, whereas for reflection they are enhanced in that region.

## IV Conclusions

We have studied the problem of quantum correlations in a system of two entangled optical pulses of arbitrary shape, propagating through dispersing and obsorbing four-port devices, which may serve as models of beam splitters, fibres, interferometers etc. Given the complex refractive-index profiles of the devices, which can be determined experimentally, the relevant parameters for the pulse propagation and the associated quantum-state transformation can be calculated without further assumptions. The devices can be viewed as realizations of noisy channels for quantum information transmission.

In the calculations we have assumed that the pulses are initially prepared in a two-mode squeezed vacuum, which is typically considered in quantum teleportation of continuous-variable systems. We have calculated various correlation measures and studied their dependence on the pulse shape and mid-frequency, the frequency response of the devices, and the initial mean photon number. In particular, the results suggest that nonclassical correlations rapidly decrease with increasing mean photon number, which may drastically limit the effectively realizable non-classical correlation in continuous-variable systems. As a realization of a four-port device, we have considered a dielectric plate of a Lorentz-type complex permittivity in more detail.

Finally, it should be remembered that the fidelity and the correlation indices are not strict entanglement measures. Nevertheless, they may be helpful to find characteristic dependences and to estimate limits of entanglement transmission. Whereas for low-dimensional discrete-variable systems such as qubits numerical methods can be used to calculate the entanglement degradation exactly, the exploding effort prevents one from applying them to continuous-variable systems such as strongly squeezed two-mode vacuum states. It has therefore been a great challenge to find explicit entanglement measures, at least for some classes of states such as Gaussian states.

## Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and by the RFBR-BRFBR Grant No. 00-02-81023. We thank S. Scheel for enlightening discussions.

## A Input-output relations

The operator input-output relations at a dispersive and absorbing four-port read

$$\widehat{b}_j(\omega )=\underset{i=1}{\overset{2}{}}T_{ji}\left(\omega \right)\widehat{a}_i\left(\omega \right)+\underset{i=1}{\overset{2}{}}A_{ji}\left(\omega \right)\widehat{g}_i\left(\omega \right),$$
(A1)
where $`\widehat{a}_i(\omega )`$ and $`\widehat{b}_j(\omega )`$ are respectively the input- and output (destruction) operators of the radiation, and $`\widehat{g}_i(\omega )`$ are the bosonic (destruction) operators of the device excitations. The $`2\times 2`$ matrices $`𝐓(\omega )`$ (transformation matrix) and $`𝐀(\omega )`$ (absorption matrix), which are determined by the complex refractive-index profile of the device , satisfy the relation

$$𝐓(\omega )𝐓^+(\omega )+𝐀(\omega )𝐀^+(\omega )=𝐈,$$
(A2)
provided that the device is embedded in vacuum. Whereas the matrix $`𝐓(\omega )`$ describes the effects of transmission and reflection, the matrix $`𝐀(\omega )`$ results from the material absorption.

Let

$$\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}=\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}[\widehat{𝜶}(\omega ),\widehat{𝜶}^{}(\omega )]$$
(A3)
be the overall input density operator, which is an operator functional of $`\widehat{𝜶}(\omega )`$ and $`\widehat{𝜶}^{}(\omega )`$, with $`\widehat{𝜶}(\omega )`$ being a “four-vector” according to

$$\widehat{𝜶}(\omega )=[\widehat{a}_1(\omega ),\widehat{a}_2(\omega ),\widehat{g}_1(\omega ),\widehat{g}_2(\omega )]^T.$$
(A4)
The operator input-output relation (A1) is then equivalent to the quantum-state transformation

$$\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}=\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}[𝚲^+(\omega )\widehat{𝜶}(\omega ),𝚲^T(\omega )\widehat{𝜶}^{}(\omega )].$$
(A5)
The unitary $`4\times 4`$ matrix $`𝚲(\omega )`$ can be expressed in terms of the $`2\times 2`$ matrices $`𝐓(\omega )`$ and $`𝐀(\omega )`$ as

$$𝚲(\omega )=\left(\begin{array}{cc}𝐓(\omega )& 𝐀(\omega )\\ 𝐅(\omega )& 𝐆(\omega )\end{array}\right),$$
(A6)
where $`𝐅(\omega )=𝐒(\omega )𝐂^1(\omega )𝐓(\omega )`$, $`𝐆(\omega )=𝐂(\omega )𝐒^1(\omega )𝐀(\omega )`$, and $`𝐂(\omega )=\sqrt{𝐓(\omega )𝐓^+(\omega )}`$, $`𝐒(\omega )=\sqrt{𝐀(\omega )𝐀^+(\omega )}`$ are commuting positive Hermitian matrices with

$$𝐂^2(\omega )+𝐒^2(\omega )=𝐈.$$
(A7)
## B Derivation of equation (20)

Combining equations (8) and (17) yields

$`\mathrm{\Phi }_{\mathrm{out}}(\alpha ,\beta )=\mathrm{exp}(\alpha \widehat{a}^{}\left[\eta ^{}\right]+\beta \widehat{d}^{}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.)_{\mathrm{out}}`$ (B3)
$`=0\left|\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\mathrm{exp}(\alpha \widehat{a}^{}\left[\eta ^{}\right]+\beta \widehat{d}^{}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.)\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\right|0`$
$`=0\left|\mathrm{exp}(\alpha \widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\widehat{a}^{}\left[\eta ^{}\right]\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)+\beta \widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\widehat{d}^{}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.)\right|0.`$
It is not difficult to prove, on applying the operator expansion theorem, that

$`\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\widehat{a}\left[\eta ^{}\right]\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)=`$ (B6)
$`=\widehat{a}\left[\eta ^{}\right]e^{i\phi _q}\mathrm{sinh}|q|T\eta \left(\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\widehat{d}^{}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]+(1\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2)^{1/2}\widehat{p}_{\stackrel{~}{\eta }}^{}\right)`$
$`+(\mathrm{cosh}|q|1)T\eta \left(T\eta \widehat{a}\left[\eta ^{}\right]+(1T\eta ^2)^{1/2}\widehat{q}_\eta \right)`$
and

$`\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\widehat{d}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)=`$ (B9)
$`=\widehat{d}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]e^{i\phi _q}\mathrm{sinh}|q|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\left(T\eta \widehat{a}^{}\left[\eta ^{}\right]+(1T\eta ^2)^{1/2}\widehat{q}_\eta ^{}\right)`$
$`+(\mathrm{cosh}|q|1)\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\left(\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\widehat{d}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right]+(1\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }^2)^{1/2}\widehat{p}_{\stackrel{~}{\eta }}\right).`$
Substituting these expressions into equation (B3) and performing a normal ordering procedure, after some straightforward calculations we arrive at $`\mathrm{\Phi }_{\mathrm{out}}(\alpha ,\beta )`$ as given in equation (20). Note that for $`T(\omega )=\stackrel{~}{T}(\omega )1`$ the characteristic function $`\mathrm{\Phi }_{\mathrm{in}}(\alpha ,\beta )`$ of the quantum state of the incoming fields is obtained.

## C Derivation of equation (27)

According to equations (7), (8), and (26), we may write

$`F_e=\mathrm{Tr}^{(a,d)}\left(\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{in}}^{(a,d)}\widehat{\varrho }_{\mathrm{out}}^{(a,d)}\right)`$ (C4)
$`=\mathrm{Tr}^{(a,d)}\left\{\widehat{S}(q)|0_a,0_d0_a,0_d|\widehat{S}^{}(q)\mathrm{Tr}^{()}\left[\widehat{S}^{}(q)|00|\widehat{S}^{{}_{}{}^{}}(q)\right]\right\}`$
$`=\mathrm{Tr}\left\{\widehat{S}^{{}_{}{}^{}}(q)\widehat{S}(q)|0_a,0_d0_a,0_d|\widehat{S}^{}(q)\widehat{S}^{}(q)|00|\right\}`$
$`=0|\widehat{S}^{{}_{}{}^{}}(q)\widehat{S}(q)|0_a,0_d0_a,0_d|\widehat{S}^{}(q)\widehat{S}^{}(q)|0.`$
We introduce the series expansions

$`\widehat{S}(q)|0_a,0_d={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}|q|}}{\displaystyle \underset{n=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}\mathrm{tanh}^n|q|e^{in\phi _q}{\displaystyle \frac{(\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }])^n}{n!}}|0_a,0_d,`$ (C5)
$`\widehat{S}^{}(q)|0={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}|q|}}{\displaystyle \underset{m=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}\mathrm{tanh}^m|q|e^{im\phi _q}{\displaystyle \frac{(\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ]\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }])^m}{m!}}|0`$ (C6)
and find

$`0_a,0_d|\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)\widehat{S}^{}\left(q\right)|0={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}^2|q|}}{\displaystyle \underset{n=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}\{\mathrm{tanh}^{2n}|q|`$ (C8)
$`\times 0_a,0_d|{\displaystyle \frac{(\widehat{a}[\eta ]\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }])^n}{n!}}{\displaystyle \frac{(T\eta \stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta }\widehat{a}^{}\left[\eta ^{}\right]\widehat{d}^{}\left[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}\right])^n}{n!}}|0\}.`$
Combining equations (C4) and (C8) and using the the commutation relations

$`[\widehat{a}[\eta ],\widehat{a}^{}[\eta ^{}]]`$ $`=`$ $`(\eta |T\eta )/T\eta ,`$ (C9)
$`[\widehat{d}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }],\widehat{d}^{}[\stackrel{~}{\eta }^{}]]`$ $`=`$ $`(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })/\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta },`$ (C10)
we eventually arrive at

$`F_e`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}^4|q|}}|{\displaystyle \underset{m=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}[(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })\mathrm{tanh}^2|q|]^m|^2`$ (C11)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}^4|q|}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{|1(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })\mathrm{tanh}^2|q||^2}}`$ (C12)
$`=`$ $`|1+[1(\eta |T\eta )(\stackrel{~}{\eta }|\stackrel{~}{T}\stackrel{~}{\eta })]\mathrm{sinh}^2|q||^2.`$ (C13)


text:
# HD-THEP-00-20 March 2000 On Thermalization in Classical Scalar Field Theory

## 1 Introduction

Time evolution of correlation functions in classical field theory out of thermal equilibrium is of interest for various reasons. On one side a classical field theory (after discretization on a lattice to regulate the Rayleigh-Jeans divergence) provides a relatively simple playground for testing various ideas of statistical mechanics. Examples in the literature include the approach to thermal equilibrium , the relation with chaos , and the dynamics in thermal gradients, when the system is coupled to external heat baths at the boundaries . A more pragmatic reason is given by the recent emergence of classical  and semiclassical  approximations to nonperturbative dynamics of low-momentum modes in nonequilibrium quantum field theory. Knowledge of thermalization properties of classical field theories is important to determine the applicability of these approaches.

A nonequilibrium ensemble can be defined by an initial probability distribution with the property that the energy is distributed over the available degrees of freedom in some nonequilibrium fashion. One would say that an ensemble with a very large number of degrees of freedom has “thermalized” when after sufficiently long time the expectation values of observables approach the thermal ones, and in fact become time-independent. More precisely, we restrict this criterion to observables and correlation functions with support in a region of space that is sufficiently small as compared to the total volume. (We will always consider isolated systems, i.e. without an external heat bath.) We concentrate on equal-time correlation functions, and define thermal values of correlation functions by expectation values in the canonical ensemble with the same average energy as the ensemble under consideration.

It has been argued  that the existence of conserved correlation functions constitutes an obstruction to thermalization. This may be illustrated by an ensemble consisting of many independent experiments with isolated systems where the initial conditions have some experimental uncertainty in the energy density $`ϵ`$. As an example, this is realized in heavy-ion collisions by many independent scattering events. An initial nonvanishing spread $`\mathrm{\Delta }ϵ/ϵ`$ is conserved by the time evolution of the ensemble - it corresponds to a conserved correlation function. In consequence, the ensemble cannot relax asymptotically to a canonical ensemble with a temperature given by the average energy density. In the latter case $`\mathrm{\Delta }ϵ/ϵ`$ would have to vanish in the thermodynamic limit. In this paper we clarify how this issue can be related to our understanding of thermalization.

For our investigation a natural ordering is provided by the type of ensembles that can be considered. Given an initial nonequilibrium probability distribution, we call one particular realization of this distribution a “microstate”. The simplest ensemble consists of only one microstate. We will see below that for single microstates fluctuations in time remain, even for asymptotically large times, and we study therefore the behaviour of time-averaged observables

$$O_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)=\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Delta }t}_{t\mathrm{\Delta }t}^t𝑑t^{}O(t^{}).$$
(1)
They become stationary for sufficiently large $`t`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$. We shall call this behaviour “quasi-stationary”. More advanced ensembles are formed by superimposing more than one microstate: in particular, an ensemble consisting of $`N_m`$ microstates which have the same energy $`E`$ and contribute with the same weight will be referred to as a fixed-energy ensemble. Of interest is now the behaviour of ensemble-averaged observables,

$$O_{E,N_m}(t)=\frac{1}{N_m}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N_m}{}}O_i(t).$$
(2)
Note that these expectation values can be defined locally in time, which makes it more suitable for the study of the time evolution of expectation values out of equilibrium. Expectation values in a fixed-energy ensemble with an infinite number of microstates are denoted as $`O_EO_{E,\mathrm{}}`$. Finally, a more general ensemble can be built as the superposition of states with different energy, weighted with a weight function $`f(E)`$.

Specific questions can now be raised. Will the nonequilibrium ensembles described above indeed thermalize according to the definition given earlier? Are there restrictions on those ensembles, e.g. on the weight function $`f(E)`$? Is it important that a fixed-energy ensemble, unlike the canonical one, has no energy fluctuations? Further: is it possible to approximate the time evolution using a (truncated) expansion in, for instance, 1-particle irreducible vertex functions, at arbitrarily long times?

## 2 Classical scalar field theory

We will address the issues mentioned above from first principles by numerical simulations using a simple classical scalar field theory in $`1+1`$ dimensions with the action

$$S=𝑑t_0^L𝑑x\left[\frac{1}{2}(_t\varphi )^2\frac{1}{2}(_x\varphi )^2\frac{1}{2}m^2\varphi ^2\frac{\lambda }{8}\varphi ^4\right].$$
(3)
Here $`L`$ is the (one-dimensional) volume and we use periodic boundary conditions. The equation of motion reads $`_t^2\varphi =_x^2\varphi m^2\varphi \lambda \varphi ^3/2`$, and the conserved energy is

$$E=_0^L𝑑x\left[\frac{1}{2}\pi ^2+\frac{1}{2}(_x\varphi )^2+\frac{1}{2}m^2\varphi ^2+\frac{\lambda }{8}\varphi ^4\right],$$
(4)
where $`\pi (x,t)=_t\varphi (x,t)`$ is the canonical momentum. In order to solve the time evolution, we discretize the action in the standard way on a lattice with $`N`$ spatial lattice points, with spatial lattice spacing $`a`$ (such that $`aN=L`$) and time step $`a_0`$, and derive the equation of motion from the discretized action.777This gives the Lagrange version of the leap frog discretization. We then solve this equation numerically, starting from a nonequilibrium initial condition.

Out of the infinite number of possible nonequilibrium initial conditions, we chose the following microstates: the field $`\varphi (x,0)`$ is initially set to zero, and only a few long wavelenghts of $`\pi (x,0)`$ are excited. Explicitly,

$$\varphi (x,0)=0,\pi (x,0)=\underset{k}{}^{}A\mathrm{cos}(2\pi kx/L\psi _k),$$
(5)
where $`k`$ is integer and $`0\psi _k<2\pi `$ . The prime indicates that only a very restricted number $`n_\mathrm{e}N`$ of modes is excited. We have chosen $`n_\mathrm{e}=4`$ modes with momentum of the order of the mass ($`p2\pi k/Lm`$). For arbitrary coupling constant the initial energy is $`E=n_\mathrm{e}LA^2/4`$. Many initial conditions with a certain energy can be generated by choosing different phases $`\psi _k`$ in Eq. (5). We construct a fixed-energy nonequilibrium ensemble as a superposition of $`N_m`$ microstates with random $`\psi _k`$ and equal weight. The time evolution of ensemble averages can be calculated by summing over the realizations. Note that for $`N_m\mathrm{}`$, the fixed-energy ensemble defined in this way is translationally invariant: for instance the initial two-point function reads

$$\pi (x,0)\pi (y,0)_E=\underset{k}{}^{}\frac{1}{2}A^2\mathrm{cos}[2\pi k(xy)/L].$$
(6)
Microstates and ensembles with $`N_m<\mathrm{}`$ do not have this property, of course.

The class of initial conditions (5) is far from classical thermal equilibrium, where all modes of both $`\varphi `$ and $`\pi `$ have nonzero expectation values of their squared amplitude, determined by the parameters in the action and the temperature $`T`$. For a free system ($`\lambda =0`$), the temperature is related to the total energy by equipartition as $`E=NT=LT/a`$. Note that this reflects the (linear) Rayleigh-Jeans divergence in classical thermal field theory, as $`a`$ goes to zero. Corrections due to the nonzero coupling constant are finite in $`1+1`$ dimensions.

It is convenient to use the mass parameter $`m`$ as the dimensionful scale, and rescale all dimensionful parameters with $`m`$, i.e. $`x=x^{}/m,t=t^{}/m,\lambda =m^2\lambda ^{}`$. If we also rescale the field with the dimensionless combination $`vm/\sqrt{3\lambda }`$, $`\varphi =v\varphi ^{}`$, the classical equation of motion is independent of $`\lambda ^{}`$. The dimensionless energy $`E^{}`$ is related to unscaled energy $`E`$ as $`E^{}=E/(mv^2)=3\lambda E/m^3`$, and similar for the temperature: $`E^{}/T^{}=E/T`$. A given value of $`E^{}`$ describes therefore several values of $`\lambda /m^2`$ if $`E/m`$ is changed accordingly. Note that for fixed $`E/m`$ a more strongly coupled theory is obtained by taking higher $`E^{}`$. To anticipate the Rayleigh-Jeans divergence in thermal equilibrium, we keep the ratio $`E^{}/N`$ fixed, when varying the lattice spacing or volume. Besides $`E^{}/N`$, the remaining parameters that need to be specified are the physical volume $`L^{}=mL`$, the lattice spacing $`a^{}=ma`$ (or equivalently $`N=mL/ma`$). For the time step we use $`a_0/a=0.05`$ (we have also used smaller time steps, and found no significant deviations).

We concentrate on correlation functions that are built from the conjugate momentum $`\pi (x,t)`$, since these can easily be compared with equal-time expectation values in thermal equilibrium, where the only nontrivial correlation function is

$$\pi (x,t)\pi (y,t)_T=\frac{T}{a}\delta _{xy}.$$
(7)
With respect to the space dependence, we consider both expectation values of global observables, i.e. observables averaged over the complete volume, and observables that are averaged in space over a “subvolume” with size $`L_s<L`$ only. In the latter case one may think of the rest of the system as an effective heat bath, though it is of course still correlated with the subsystem under consideration and hence not a heat bath in the strict sense.

We focus on expectation values, made from the following two building blocks:

$$G_s^{(2)}(x_s,t)=\frac{1}{N_s}\underset{x}{}^{(N_s)}\pi ^2(x,t),G_s^{(4)}(x_s,t)=\frac{1}{N_s}\underset{x}{}^{(N_s)}\pi ^4(x,t).$$
(8)
The label $`N_s`$ denotes that the average is taken over a subvolume with $`N_s=L_s/a`$ points, centered around $`x=x_s`$. In case that $`N_s=N`$ the complete volume average is taken, and the subscript $`s`$ is omitted. The kinetic energy in a subvolume is given by

$$K_s(x_s,t)=\frac{1}{2}aN_sG_s^{(2)}(x_s,t).$$
(9)
In thermal equilibrium its value is $`K_s_T=N_sT/2`$, independent of $`x_s`$ of course. One may define an effective temperature, locally in time and out of equilibrium, from the expectation value

$$T_\pi (t)=2K(t)/N.$$
(10)
Note that this is an example of a “primary” quantity, i.e. it is directly given as an ensemble average.

The observables we investigate are the following. In the canonical ensemble $`\pi `$ is a gaussian (free) field, which implies that $`G_s^{(4)}_T=3G_s^{(2)}_T^2`$. We want to see whether $`\pi `$ becomes eventually gaussian in the nonequilibrium ensembles as well. We define the deviation from $`\pi `$ being gaussian in a subvolume as

$$\text{dev}(\pi _s)=\frac{G_s^{(4)}(x_s,t)}{3G_s^{(2)}(x_s,t)^2}1.$$
(11)
For one microstate or in a fixed-energy ensemble the conserved total energy has no fluctuations. The time evolution of the fluctuations in the kinetic energy of subsystems

$$\text{fluc}(K_s)=\frac{(K_sK_s)^2}{K_s^2}.$$
(12)
is interesting for two reasons: first, although they never vanish, for a closed system one expects some suppression from the fact that the total energy is conserved. Second, one can calculate in the canonical case the size of the fluctuations exactly: $`\text{fluc}(K_s)_T=2/N_s`$. This provides the possibility for a quantitative comparison. The last observable we discuss is the normalized third moment of the kinetic energy in a subvolume (the second moment is related to fluc($`K_s`$)), and is denoted as

$$\text{mom}(K_s^3)=\frac{K_s^3}{K_s^3}.$$
(13)
In thermal equilibrium mom$`(K_s^3)_T=1+6/N_s+8/N_s^2`$. This observable differs from the previous ones in that it is neither directly related to fluctuations nor purely local, since it involves the expectation value of $`\pi ^2(x,t)\pi ^2(y,t)\pi ^2(z,t)`$ with $`x,y,z`$ all in the same subvolume. These three observables are related in a nonlinear manner to ensemble averages, and hence examples of “secondary” quantities. Note also that in the canonical ensemble they are independent of the temperature.

## 3 Single microstates

We start with ensembles consisting of one microstate only. For each $`E^{}/N`$ we generate a number of initial conditions with the same energy, and integrate the equation of motion. We take time averages over an interval $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ for each microstate separately. For convenience we sometimes average at the end over independent runs in order to reduce the fluctuations in time.

To get some feeling for the time scales involved, we show in Fig. 1 how dev($`\pi )_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ relaxes towards zero as a function of time, for various values of the energy. In this case the time averages are taken over an interval $`m\mathrm{\Delta }t=62.5`$, and since the size of the fluctuations in time in each microstate remains rather large, we show in Fig. 1 curves averaged over 20 independent initial conditions per energy value. As stated before, there is a correspondence between high energy and large coupling, and we see that the time scale involved increases for decreasing $`E^{}/N`$, as expected.

It is clear from Fig. 1 that $`\pi `$ tends to become gaussian: dev($`\pi )_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}0`$. To make this precise, we discard the initial part where dev($`\pi )_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ is not quasi-stationary and calculate the time average in a long, interval $`m\mathrm{\Delta }t=10000`$, for several values of $`mL`$ and $`ma`$, subvolume sizes $`mL_s=4,8,16`$, and energies $`E^{}/N=2,\mathrm{},10`$. For each $`E^{}/N`$ we have generated 10 initial conditions. We have observed no significant dependence of the long-time values on either the initial condition for a fixed energy, the energy $`E^{}/N`$ in the interval indicated, or the subvolume size. The asymptotic average value of dev($`\pi )_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ depends only on the total number of degrees of freedom $`N`$, as shown in Fig. 2. Note that changing $`mL`$ with fixed $`am`$ or vice versa has the same effect. For finite $`N`$, we see that $`\pi `$ deviates from being gaussian, on the order of a percent for $`N=100`$. However, in the thermodynamic limit, which is $`N\mathrm{}`$ in this classical lattice model, $`\pi `$ becomes a gaussian field. A straight-line fit shows that the thermodynamic limit is approached as dev($`\pi )_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}=1.03(2)/N0.0003(2)`$, where the numbers between brackets indicate the error in the last digit from the fit. Also shown in Fig. 2 is the relative deviation of mom($`K^3)_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ from the thermal value. Again we found no significant dependence on the subvolume size, the energy, or the particular initial condition. Also in this case we see a deviation from the thermal value for finite $`N`$, which vanishes in the thermodynamic limit as $`3.01(3)/N0.0003(3)`$.

The relative deviation of $`\text{fluc}(K)_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ from the thermal value is shown in Fig. 3, again in the quasi-stationary regime with $`m\mathrm{\Delta }t=10000`$, using several energies as before. We present the result as a function of $`L_s/L=N_s/N`$. For $`N_s/N=1`$, we see that the fluctuations are suppressed by approximately 50%, compared to the thermal value. A straight-line fit shows that the data are consistent with

$$\text{fluc}(K_s)_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}=\frac{2}{N_s}\left(1\frac{1.4(2)}{N}0.514(1)\frac{N_s}{N}\right).$$
(14)
In other words, in the proper thermodynamic limit, $`N\mathrm{}`$ and $`N_s/N0`$, the fluctuations are given by the canonical ones. On the other hand, in the limit $`N\mathrm{}`$ with fixed $`N_s/N`$, $`\text{fluc}(K_s)_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ deviates from the canonical value, confirming the expectation that the heat bath must be infinitely larger than the subsystem under consideration.

The results obtained so far indicate that single microstates evolving from an initial condition taken from the class (5) thermalize in the thermodynamic limit, in a time-averaged sense.

## 4 Fixed-energy ensembles

To extend the analysis, we continue with fixed-energy ensembles, built as superpositions of $`N_m>1`$ microstates (5) with the same energy $`E`$. We present the effect of ensemble averaging for dev($`\pi )_{E,N_m}`$ in Fig. 4 for ensembles consisting of $`N_m=10`$ and $`N_m=150`$ members, respectively. We emphasize that there is no time averaging performed here, unlike the microstate case. It is seen that the larger the ensemble, the smaller the size of the fluctuations. To make this quantitative, we identify the size of the fluctuations with the standard deviation $`\sigma _{E,N_m}`$ around the mean value in the quasi-stationary regime. Explicitly, for a generic primary observable

$$\sigma _{E,N_m}^2O_{E,N_m}^2_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}O_{E,N_m}_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}^2.$$
(15)
In Fig. 5 we show the asymptotic values of $`\sigma _{E,N_m}`$ for the observables $`T_\pi `$ and dev($`\pi )`$, as functions of $`1/\sqrt{N_m}`$. For the quasi-stationary regime the interval $`30000<mt<50000`$ was used. We see that in an ensemble with $`N_m\mathrm{}`$ members the standard deviations vanish, which implies that the expectation values become time-independent, and the ensemble becomes stationary.

These results are consistent with the results obtained in ensembles consisting of one microstate only. Using definition (2) for a primary observable $`O`$, we find that the variance (15) is given by

$`\sigma _{E,N_m}^2`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N_m^2}}{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}\left[O_iO_j_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)O_i_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)O_j_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)\right]`$ (16)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N_m^2}}{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}\left[O_i^2_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)O_i_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}^2(t)\right]`$
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N_m^2}}{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}\sigma _{\mathrm{\Delta }t,i}^2,`$
where $`\sigma _{\mathrm{\Delta }t,i}`$ denotes the standard deviation around the mean value in the quasi-stationary regime in the $`i`$th microstate. The second line follows if the individual microstates are statistically independent, i.e. $`O_iO_j_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)=O_i_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)O_j_{\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)`$ for $`ij`$. If we now use that the standard deviation $`\sigma _{\mathrm{\Delta }t,i}`$ in a particular realization is independent of the specific details of the initial condition, such that $`\sigma _{\mathrm{\Delta }t,i}\sigma _{\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$ for all $`i`$, we conclude that $`\sigma _{E,N_m}=\sigma _{\mathrm{\Delta }t}/\sqrt{N_m}`$, in agreement with the numerical results. Note that this implies that the initial probability distribution given by (5) with $`n_\mathrm{e}=4`$ is already “rich” enough to define a fixed-energy ensemble with stationary asymptotic behaviour.

## 5 Generic ensembles

Perhaps surprisingly, we can use the results obtained above to show that generic ensembles approach noncanonical stationary distributions. Let us consider an initial ensemble whose energy is not precisely fixed, but has some finite spread: $`\mathrm{\Delta }E^2(EE)^20`$. Note that the spread is conserved during time evolution. The issue of thermalization in this case is more complicated. To get some feeling for this, let us first consider the simple case of a superposition of fixed-energy ensembles weighted with a normalized gaussian function $`f(E)`$:

$$f(E)=𝒩_\kappa \mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{1}{2}\kappa (E\overline{E})^2/\overline{E}^2\right],$$
(17)
with $`𝒩_\kappa =(\kappa /2\pi \overline{E}^2)^{1/2}`$ and where $`\kappa `$ is a large but finite constant in the thermodynamic limit. The energy spread for this ensemble is $`\mathrm{\Delta }E^2/\overline{E}^2=1/\kappa `$. Under the assumption that the individual fixed-energy ensembles evolve to the corresponding microcanonical ones, the large-time asymptotic stationary values of all primary quantities can be obtained by folding the microcanonical ones with $`f(E)`$. It is then straightforward to compute also secondary quantities such as connected functions. Using definition (10) for the temperature $`T_\pi `$, we obtain888Neglecting the nonlinear $`T`$-dependence of $`E`$.

$`\text{dev}(\pi )_\kappa 1/\kappa ,`$ (18)
$`\pi ^2(x)\pi ^2(y)_\kappa \pi ^2(x)_\kappa \pi ^2(y)_\kappa (T_\pi /a)^2/\kappa ,xy.`$ (19)
We emphasize that secondary quantities defined for the whole ensemble are not weighted averages of the corresponding quantities in the individual microcanical ensembles. From Eq. (18) we see that this ensemble does not have thermal correlation functions, i.e. dev($`\pi )_\kappa 0`$, not even in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, since the left-hand-side of Eq. (19) is nothing else than the connected four-point function and the right-hand-side does not vanish for $`|xy|\mathrm{}`$, we find that the ensemble (17) does not obey the clustering property . A violation of clustering has a rather large impact on other observables, for instance for $`NN_s`$ we find that

$$\text{fluc}(K_s)_\kappa =\frac{2}{N_s}\left(1+\frac{N_s+2}{2\kappa }\right).$$
(20)
Fluctuations in the kinetic energy in subvolumes will deviate substantially from the canonical value when $`\kappa N_s`$. In the limit that $`N_s\kappa `$, the size of the fluctuations approaches $`1/\kappa `$ and therefore does not vanish.

In order to make the discussion more general, let us now consider a system with $`n_c`$ conserved intensive quantities $`𝐜=\{c_\mu \}`$, $`\mu =1,\mathrm{},n_c`$. Supported by our numerical results, we assume that all microstates with given $`𝐜`$ evolve, in an asymptotic, time-averaged sense, to the same final state, i.e. that all details of the initial state other than the conserved quantities are lost. In other words, for a local observable $`O`$ in microstate $`i`$:

$$\underset{t\mathrm{},\mathrm{\Delta }t\mathrm{},\mathrm{\Delta }t/t0}{lim}\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Delta }t}_{t\mathrm{\Delta }t}^tO_i(t)=O_{N,𝐜}^{}.$$
(21)
Here $`O_{N,𝐜}^{}`$ is the expectation value of $`O`$ in the microcanonical ensemble with fixed $`𝐜`$ and $`N`$ degrees of freedom.999Asymptotic values will generically be denoted with a star. We further assume that an ensemble consisting of a superposition of sufficiently many states, all with the same values of $`𝐜`$, evolves to the corresponding microcanonical ensemble:

$$\underset{t\mathrm{}}{lim}O(t)_𝐜=O_{N,𝐜}^{}.$$
(22)
Notice that in this case no time averaging is required.

We then consider ensembles that are superpositions of states with different values of $`𝐜`$, weighted with a normalized weight function $`f_N(𝐜)`$. As an example, one may consider again a gaussian distribution:

$$f_N(𝐜)=\underset{\mu }{}\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi \mathrm{\Delta }c_\mu ^2}}\mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{1}{2}(c_\mu \overline{c}_\mu )^2/\mathrm{\Delta }c_\mu ^2\right],$$

with $`\mathrm{\Delta }c_\mu 1/N^\alpha `$. In this case $`\mathrm{\Delta }𝐜^2\overline{𝐜^2}\overline{𝐜}^20`$, where $`\overline{𝐜}=𝑑𝐜f_N(𝐜)𝐜`$. Provided that the ensemble is sufficiently “rich”, i.e. all subensembles with given values of $`𝐜`$ satisfy Eq. (22), the asymptotic expectation values depend only on the weight function $`f_N(𝐜)`$:

$$O_{f_N}^{}=𝑑𝐜f_N(𝐜)O_{N,𝐜}^{}.$$
(23)
For $`\mathrm{\Delta }c_\mu 1/N^\alpha `$ we extract the leading $`N`$-dependence by writing the weight function $`f_N`$ as

$$f_N(𝐜)=N^{\alpha n_c}\phi (𝐬),𝐬=N^\alpha (𝐜\overline{𝐜}),$$
(24)
where we assume that $`\phi `$ is in first approximation $`N`$-independent. The case $`\alpha =0`$ corresponds to fixed $`\mathrm{\Delta }c_\mu /c_\mu `$, independent of $`N`$. For a canonical ensemble one has $`f_N^{\mathrm{can}}(E/N)=Z_T^1\mathrm{\Omega }(E)e^{E/T}`$, where $`\mathrm{\Omega }(E)`$ is the number of states with energy density $`ϵ=E/N`$ and $`Z_T`$ is the canonical partition function. In this case, the spread in the energy density is given by $`\mathrm{\Delta }ϵN^{1/2}`$ and therefore $`\alpha =1/2`$. In general, we shall assume $`\alpha 0`$.

We expand $`O_{N,𝐜}^{}`$ in a Taylor series around $`\overline{𝐜}`$ such that Eq. (23) yields

$`O_{f_N}^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{m=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{m!N^{\alpha m}}}{\displaystyle \frac{^mO_{N,\overline{𝐜}}^{}}{c_{\mu _1}\mathrm{}c_{\mu _m}}}{\displaystyle 𝑑𝐬\phi (𝐬)s_{\mu _1}\mathrm{}s_{\mu _m}}`$ (25)
$`=`$ $`O_{N,\overline{𝐜}}^{}+{\displaystyle \frac{\overline{s_\mu s_\nu }}{2N^{2\alpha }}}{\displaystyle \frac{^2O_{N,\overline{𝐜}}^{}}{c_\mu c_\nu }}+𝒪(N^{3\alpha }),`$
with $`\overline{s_\mu s_\nu }=𝑑𝐬\phi (𝐬)s_\mu s_\nu `$. Notice that the $`m=1`$ term in the series drops out due to the definition of $`\overline{𝐜}`$. In the case that $`f_N`$ is the weight function for the canonical ensemble, Eq. (25) shows that the expectation values in a fixed-energy ensemble will differ from the canonical ones as $`1/N`$. This is exactly the behaviour we found numerically (see above). Generic ensembles with $`\alpha >0`$ can be compared with the canonical one by applying (25) twice, i.e. by subtracting from (25) the same equation with $`f_N=f_N^{\mathrm{can}}`$. It is then found that primary observables, i.e. expectation values that are directly given as ensemble averages, approach the canonical values in the thermodynamic limit, and the way this limit is approached is directly proportional to the spread in the conserved quantities $`\overline{s_\mu s_\nu }`$. For a finite $`\mathrm{\Delta }c_\mu /c_\mu `$ in the thermodynamic limit, the asymptotic expectation values will differ by a nonzero amount from both the microcanonical and the canonical ensembles, even in the thermodynamic limit. However, this difference is suppressed by $`\mathrm{\Delta }c^2`$.

For secondary quantities, i.e. observables that are nonlinear functions of ensemble averages, the situation is more involved. For definiteness, let us go back to the scalar theory (3), which has only one conserved quantity: $`c_1=ϵ`$.101010The other obvious candidate, the total momentum $`P=_x\pi (x)_x\varphi (x)`$, is not conserved on the lattice. We have checked that expectation values of $`P`$ and $`P^2`$ approximately thermalize, regardless of their initial values. We restrict ourselves to translation-invariant ensembles. Notice also that the connected two-point functions for $`\varphi `$ and $`\pi `$ behave asymptotically as primary quantities, since $`\varphi _N^{}=\pi _N^{}=0`$. An example of a secondary quantity is the equal-time connected 4-point correlation function

$`\psi (x)\psi (y)\psi (z)\psi (w)_{f_N,C}`$ $``$ $`\psi (x)\psi (y)\psi (z)\psi (w)_{f_N}`$
$`\left(\psi (x)\psi (y)_{f_N}\psi (z)\psi (w)_{f_N}+\text{two perm.}\right),`$
with $`\psi =\{\pi ,\varphi \}`$. Here we have extended the standard definition of connected correlation functions to arbitrary ensembles. In particular, $`\pi ^4(x)_{f_N,C}^{}`$ is related to dev($`\pi )`$ in Eq. (11). Using Eq. (25), we find

$$\pi ^4(x)_{f_N,C}^{}\pi ^4(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}+\frac{\overline{s^2}}{2N^{2\alpha }}\left[\frac{d^2}{dϵ^2}\pi ^4(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}+6\left(\frac{d}{dϵ}\pi ^2(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\right)^2\right],$$
(27)
with $`\overline{s^2}/N^{2\alpha }=\mathrm{\Delta }ϵ^2`$. In the case that $`f_N=f_N^{\mathrm{can}}`$ (with $`\alpha =1/2`$), the connected 4-point function on the left-hand-side vanishes, and the fluctuations in the energy density are given by $`\overline{s^2}=T^2\overline{ϵ}/T`$. If we use the definition of temperature in the fixed-energy ensemble $`T_\pi /a=\pi ^2(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}`$ and work consistently to order $`1/N`$, so that $`T_\pi `$ can be identified with the temperature $`T`$ in the canonical ensemble, Eq. (27) yields

$$\pi ^4(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}=3\frac{\overline{s^2}}{N}\left(\frac{d}{dϵ}\pi ^2(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\right)^2=\frac{3}{N}\left(\frac{T}{a}\right)^2\frac{T}{\overline{ϵ}},$$
(28)
and

$$\text{dev}(\pi )_E=\frac{\pi ^4(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}}{3\pi ^2(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^2}=\frac{1}{N}\frac{T}{\overline{ϵ}}.$$
(29)
We have measured dev$`(\pi )`$ and the energy dependence of the effective temperature in fixed-energy ensembles independently (Figs. 2 and 6, respectively), and have found Eq. (29) to be satisfied within numerical accuracy.

As we saw in the example (17), the connected function (5) does not, in general, obey the clustering property. Using Eq. (25), we can write

$`\psi ^2(x)\psi ^2(y)_{f_N,C}^{}`$ $``$ $`\psi ^2(x)\psi ^2(y)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}+{\displaystyle \frac{\overline{s^2}}{2N^{2\alpha }}}[{\displaystyle \frac{d^2}{dϵ^2}}\psi ^2(x)\psi ^2(y)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}`$ (30)
$`+2\left({\displaystyle \frac{d}{dϵ}}\psi ^2(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\right)^2+4\left({\displaystyle \frac{d}{dϵ}}\psi (x)\psi (y)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\right)^2].`$
The limit of large spatial separation for the fixed-energy ensembles can be extracted by comparison with the canonical ensemble, where clustering holds and the left-hand-side vanishes for $`|xy|\mathrm{}`$. Using $`f_N=f_N^{\mathrm{can}}`$, one finds

$$\underset{|xy|\mathrm{}}{lim}\psi ^2(x)\psi ^2(y)_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}=\frac{T^2}{N}\frac{\overline{ϵ}}{T}\left(\frac{d}{dϵ}\psi ^2(x)_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\right)^2+𝒪(N^{3/2}).$$
(31)
In the microcanonical ensemble the connected 4-point function vanishes, in the limit of large separations, only up to terms of order $`1/N`$. Using this result in Eq. (30) for an generic ensemble with a nonzero (noncanonical) spread in the energy density, we find that also in these ensembles the clustering property will be violated. For $`\alpha =0`$ the right-hand-side of Eq. (30) is dominated by the first term on the second line and we recover the result (19).

It is instructive to translate these findings to momentum space. We introduce the notation

$$\psi (q_1)\mathrm{}\psi (q_n)Na\delta _{q_1+\mathrm{}+q_N,0}\psi _1\mathrm{}\psi _n$$
(32)
where we factored out a Kronecker delta function times the volume to take translational invariance into account. For a clustering system, all reduced connected functions $`\mathrm{}`$ should be finite in the limit $`N\mathrm{}`$, $`a`$ fixed. For the connected 4-point function of a generic ensemble we have

$`\psi _1\psi _2\psi _3\psi _4_{f_N,C}^{}`$ $`=`$ $`\psi _1\psi _2\psi _3\psi _4_{f_N}^{}Na\left(\psi _1\psi _2_{f_N}^{}\psi _3\psi _4_{f_N}^{}\delta _{q_1,q_2}+\text{perm.}\right)`$ (33)
$`=`$ $`\psi _1\psi _2\psi _3\psi _4_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}+{\displaystyle \frac{\overline{s^2}}{2N^{2\alpha }}}{\displaystyle \frac{d^2}{dϵ^2}}\psi _1\psi _2\psi _3\psi _4_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{\overline{s^2}a}{N^{2\alpha 1}}}\left[{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dϵ}}\psi _1\psi _2_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dϵ}}\psi _3\psi _4_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\delta _{q_1,q_2}+\text{perm.}\right].`$
When momenta come in pairs, the reduced connected 4-point functions for the microcanonical and canonical ensembles differ even in the thermodynamic limit, and, remarkably, for ensembles with $`\alpha <1/2`$ these functions actually diverge. A similar calculation for the connected 6-point function gives, to leading order,

$`\psi _1\mathrm{}\psi _6_{f_N,C}^{}`$ $`=`$ $`\psi _1\mathrm{}\psi _6_{N,\overline{ϵ},C}^{}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{\overline{s^2}a^2}{N^{2\alpha 2}}}\left[\psi _1\psi _2_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dϵ}}\psi _3\psi _4_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}{\displaystyle \frac{d}{dϵ}}\psi _5\psi _6_{N,\overline{ϵ}}^{}\delta _{q_1,q_2}\delta _{q_3,q_4}+\text{perm.}\right].`$
A comparison with the canonical ensemble shows that the reduced connected 6-point function in the microcanonical ensemble diverges in the thermodynamic limit $`N`$. For higher order connected functions to be finite for all momentum combinations, $`f_N`$ has to agree with $`f_N^{\mathrm{can}}`$ to higher and higher order in $`1/N`$. Approximation methods based on expansions in connected or 1-particle irreducible correlation functions may break down since higher-point functions could strongly affect the expansion. Without taking care of the failure of clustering properties they may not be suitable to describe thermalization phenomena. This might explain some qualitatively different results obtained in , where the same scalar theory was studied using truncations of an exact flow equation for the time evolution of equal-time correlation functions . It also puts doubts on the validity of approximations which lead to thermalization for arbitrary initial ensembles.

## 6 Conclusion

Let us summarize our conclusions for the time evolution of classical ensembles with nonequilibrium initial conditions, based on numerical results for the $`\varphi ^4`$ theory in $`1+1`$ dimensions on the lattice. The investigated statistical ensembles approach in the large-time limit stationary ensembles that depend only on the probability distribution for the energy density (and the other intensive conserved quantities). For ensembles that consist of a small number of microstates, the asymptotic ensemble is approached only in a time-averaged sense. For a very large number of degrees of freedom (thermodynamic limit) we find that ensembles with a nonzero energy density spread do not approach the canonical ensemble: their large-time primary observables differ from the thermal values by a finite amount proportional to the spread. Ensembles with vanishing spread, on the other hand, do thermalize, up to terms suppressed by the number of degrees of freedom. These corrections can be computed, and our numerical results were found to be in excellent agreement with the analytical results.

We also notice that generic statistical ensembles do not cluster for large time. Secondary quantities (like connected or 1PI functions) receive corrections that in coordinate space do not vanish in the limit of large spatial separation; as a result, corrections to quantities defined over large subvolumes can be very large. In momentum space, violation of clustering implies that for specific momentum values secondary quantities diverge in the thermodynamic limit. Clustering requires a vanishing initial spread in all conserved quantities with extreme precision. We argue therefore that care should be exercised when applying approximate methods based on expansions in connected or 1-particle irreducible correlation functions to the study of thermalization: such methods might in fact break down in the large-time regime.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the TMR network Finite Temperature Phase Transitions in Particle Physics, EU contract no. FMRX-CT97-0122.