Long-time behavior of quasistationary states of the Hamiltonian mean-field model.

The Hamiltonian mean-field model has been investigated, since its introduction about a decade ago, to study the equilibrium and dynamical properties of long-range interacting systems. Here we study the long-time behavior of long-lived, out-of-equilibrium, quasistationary dynamical states, whose lifetime diverges in the thermodynamic limit. The nature of these states has been the object of a lively debate in the recent past. We introduce a numerical tool, based on the fluctuations of the phase of the instantaneous magnetization of the system. Using this tool, we study the quasistationary states that arise when the system is started from different classes of initial conditions, showing that the new observable can be exploited to compute the lifetime of these states. We also show that quasistationary states are present not only below, but also above the critical temperature of the second-order magnetic phase transition of the model. We find that at supercritical temperatures the lifetime is much larger than at subcritical temperatures.