In this Letter, we conduct an extensive study of the two-segment Frenkel-Kontorova model. We show that the rectification effect of the heat flux reported in recent literature is possible only in the weak interfacial coupling limit. The rectification effect will be reversed when the properties of the interface and the system size change. These two types of asymmetric heat conduction are governed by different mechanisms though both are induced by nonlinearity. An intuitive physical picture is proposed to interpret the reversal of the rectification effect. Since asymmetric heat conduction depends critically on the properties of the interface and the system size, it is probably not an easy task to fabricate a thermal rectifier or thermal diode in practice.

We study heat conduction behavior of one-dimensional lattices with asymmetric, momentum conserving interparticle interactions. We find that with a certain degree of interaction asymmetry, the heat conductivity measured in nonequilibrium stationary states converges in the thermodynamical limit. Our analysis suggests that the mass gradient resulting from asymmetric interactions may provide a phonon scattering mechanism in addition to that caused by nonlinear interactions.

We study diffusion processes of local fluctuations of heat, energy, momentum, and mass in three paradigmatic one-dimensional systems. For each system, diffusion processes of four physical quantities are simulated and the cross correlations between them are investigated. We find that, in all three systems, diffusion processes of energy and mass can be perfectly expressed as a linear combination of those of heat and momentum, suggesting that diffusion processes of heat and momentum may represent the heat mode and the sound mode in the hydrodynamic theory. In addition, the dynamic structure factor, which describes the diffusion behavior of local mass density fluctuations, is in general insufficient for probing diffusion processes of other quantities because in some cases there is no correlation between them. We also find that the diffusion behavior of heat can be qualitatively different from that of energy, and, as a result, previous studies trying to relate heat conduction to energy diffusion should be revisited.

For one-dimensional nonlinear lattices with momentum conserving interparticle interactions, intensive studies have suggested that the heat conductivity $\kappa${} diverges with the system size L as $\kappa${}$\sim${}L$\alpha${} and the value of $\alpha${} is universal. But in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-$\beta${} lattices with nearest-neighbor (NN) and next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) coupling, we find that $\alpha${} strongly depends on $\gamma${}, the ratio of the NNN coupling to the NN coupling. The correlation between the $\gamma${}-dependent heat conduction behavior and the in-band discrete breathers is also analyzed.

We address the problem of the rectifying effect of heat conduction at macroscopic size. A design for a macroscopic thermal rectifier based on the macroscopic thermal conductivity of materials is introduced, and then realizations of the design are shown by numerical simulations and phenomenological estimations.

Whether Anderson localization is robust against many-body interactions and, closely related, whether a disordered many-body system can be thermalized are long outstanding issues. In this Letter, we address these issues with the wave-turbulence theory. We show that, in general, the thermalization time in one-dimensional disordered lattice systems is inversely proportional to the squared interaction strength in the thermodynamic limit. It leads to the conclusion that such systems can always be thermalized by arbitrarily weak many-body interactions and thus the localized states are unstable.