Nonthermal fixed point for massless scalar field theories

Abstract: We compute universal scaling exponents and scaling functions for massless scalar field theories far from equilibrium. Using a large-$N$ expansion to next-to-leading order, we investigate the nonperturbative infrared behaviour associated with the transport of a) energy or b) effective particle number towards low frequencies $ω$ and momenta $\bar p$. For massless dispersion $ω= \bar{p}$, we determine the scaling form of the distribution function whose universal power-law tail $f_S(\bar p) \sim 1/\bar{p}<sup>κ$ is found to be a) $κ= d+1$ and b) $κ= d$ in $d=3$ spatial dimensions. Our results establish that relativistic and nonrelativistic theories do not belong to the same universality class in this case, which opens up new applications to far-from-equilibrium phenomena in high-energy and (quantum) many-body physics with linear dispersions.