First-order integrability-breaking phase transitions in dynamical systems

Abstract

We investigate a discontinuous route from integrability to chaos using a confined stochastic random walk and a deterministic stadium-like billiard. In both systems, the stationary diffusive observable exhibits a finite jump at the transition: it vanishes at the unperturbed limit but approaches a finite, geometry-controlled value for arbitrarily small nonzero perturbations, providing the characteristic order-parameter signature of a first-order transition. Despite this discontinuity, the relaxation timescale diverges as the transition is approached, revealing critical slowing down. Both models exhibit normal diffusion with $\beta=1/2$, a perturbation-independent stationary state with $\alpha=0$, and a crossover iteration scaling as $n_x\propto\lambda^{-2}$, yielding $z=-2$, where $\lambda$ denotes the corresponding perturbation parameter. The common exponent set $(\alpha,\beta,z)=(0,1/2,-2)$ originates from the same coarse-grained mechanism: normal diffusion within a finite accessible domain with a diffusion coefficient that vanishes quadratically at the transition. The agreement between stochastic transport and deterministic chaotic scattering provides strong evidence for a common class of discontinuous dynamical transitions and extends the statistical-mechanics description of phase transitions to integrability-breaking dynamics.