Log-Sobolev inequalities for boundary-driven anharmonic chains

We study the non-equilibrium steady state of a weakly anharmonic chain of $N$ oscillators driven at its boundary by Langevin thermostats at unequal temperatures.

Under a perturbative weak-anharmonicity condition, we prove a full-gradient logarithmic Sobolev inequality whose constant is independent of the chain length $N$.

For homogeneous pinned chains, an additional quantitative regularity assumption yields a boundary space-time logarithmic Sobolev inequality and relative-entropy decay on the same $O(N^3)$ relaxation time scale as the harmonic chain.

The proof extracts a finite-dimensional Gaussian component from the boundary noise and compares conditional terminal-state laws by a change of variables.

The estimates are uniform over bounded positive temperatures and require no near-equilibrium assumption on their difference.