Quasistationarity in a model of long-range interacting particles moving on a sphere.

We consider a long-range interacting system of N particles moving on a spherical surface under an attractive Heisenberg-like interaction of infinite range and evolving under deterministic Hamilton dynamics. The system may also be viewed as one of globally coupled Heisenberg spins. In equilibrium, the system has a continuous phase transition from a low-energy magnetized phase, in which the particles are clustered on the spherical surface, to a high-energy homogeneous phase. The dynamical behavior of the model is studied analytically by analyzing the Vlasov equation for the evolution of the single-particle distribution and numerically by direct simulations. The model is found to exhibit long-lived nonmagnetized quasistationary states (QSSs) which in the thermodynamic limit are dynamically stable within an energy range where the equilibrium state is magnetized. For finite N, these states relax to equilibrium over a time that increases algebraically with N. In the dynamically unstable regime, nonmagnetized states relax fast to equilibrium over a time that scales as lnN. These features are retained in presence of a global anisotropy in the magnetization.