Spreading of Perturbations in Long-Range Interacting Classical Lattice Models

Lieb-Robinson-type bounds are reported for a large class of classical Hamiltonian lattice models. By a suitable rescaling of energy or time, such bounds can be constructed for interactions of arbitrarily long range. The bound quantifies the dependence of the system's dynamics on a perturbation of the initial state. The effect of the perturbation is found to be effectively restricted to the interior of a causal region of logarithmic shape, with only small, algebraically decaying effects in the exterior. A refined bound, sharper than conventional Lieb-Robinson bounds, is required to correctly capture the shape of the causal region, as confirmed by numerical results for classical long-range XY chains. We discuss the relevance of our findings for the relaxation to equilibrium of long-range interacting lattice models.