Fermi-Pasta-Ulam experiment

The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam experiment consisted of a one dimensional system composed of 64 particles, whose ends were fixed, and the particles were connected by a selection of forces; quadratic, cubic, and "broken"-linear. Their main finding was that there was an apparent lack of equipartition of energy amongst the available degrees of freedom, even after as many as 10,000 cycles on their fast electronic computing machine (MANIAC I).

References

Related reading

• Thierry Dauxois, Michel Peyrard and Stefano Ruffo "The Fermi–Pasta–Ulam 'numerical experiment': history and pedagogical perspectives", European Journal of Physics 26 pp. S3-S11 (2005)
• Mark Buchanan "Capturing chaos", Nature 435 p. 281 (2005)
• "FOCUS ISSUE: THE "FERMI-PASTA-ULAM" PROBLEM-THE FIRST 50 YEARS", Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science 15 March (2005)
• G. P. Berman and F. M. Izrailev "The Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem: Fifty years of progress", Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science 15 015104 (2005)
• "The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam Problem: A Status Report" Lecture Notes in Physics 728/2008 Springer (2008)