International Solvay Institutes


 

 

SYMPOSIUM HENRI POINCARE


8-9 October 2004

 

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus Plaine, Boulevard du Triomphe, B-1050 Brussels

 

 

Abstracts

 

 

 

Leonid Shilnikov (Nizhnii Novgorod State Univ.,  Russia):

Poincaré Homoclinic Orbits: The State of the Art

After a brief overview of the history of  dynamical systems with homoclinic orbits, the main part of the talk will be focused on results related to homoclinic tangencies. The importance of this problem is due to the fact that, in this framework, one can answer many fundamental questions both in the theory of general smooth dynamical systems and of Hamiltonian ones. In this respect, we enumerate several topics that will be discussed in this talk:
1. Classification of the principal types of homoclinic tangencies.
2. Description of the principal continuous  invariants - Omega-modulae.
3. Existence of Newhouse regions, that is, regions of everywhere dense structural instability.
4. Examples of systems with wild attractors: spiral attractors and attractors of Lorenz-type systems under an external forcing.
5. Coexistence of countable sets of hyperbolic periodic orbits of different topological types .
6. Everywhere density in Newhouse regions of 2D diffeomorphisms, including symplectic ones, having countable sets of periodic orbits of arbitrary order of degeneracy in the space of diffeomorphisms endowed with any finite C_r- topology.
7. Existence of a countable set of periodic orbits of the general elliptic type for 2D symplectic diffeomorphisms with homoclinic tangencies.
8. Existence of a countable set of periodic orbits being KAM stable for 4D symplectic diffeomorphisms with a tangent homoclinic orbit to a saddle-focus fixed point.





Pierre Gaspard (ULB, Belgium):

From Dynamical Systems Theory to Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics


An overview is given of recent work on the relationships between dynamical systems theory and nonequilibrium thermodynamics.  In these recent works, the hydrodynamic modes of diffusion are constructed  in translationally invariant chaotic Hamiltonian systems.  These modes describe the relaxation toward the thermodynamic equilibrium and are given as the eigenstates associated with Pollicott-Ruelle resonances.  The hydrodynamic modes have a fractal structure characterized by a Hausdorff dimension which is given in terms of the diffusion coefficient and the Lyapunov exponent  characterizing the dynamical instability.  The singular character of the hydrodynamic modes turns out to be an essential feature in order to understand the production of entropy in Hamiltonian systems.

References:

P. Gaspard, I. Claus, T. Gilbert, and J. R. Dorfman, The Fractality of the Hydrodynamic Modes of Diffusion, Physical Review Letters 86 (2001) 1506-1509.
J. R. Dorfman, P. Gaspard, and T. Gilbert,  Entropy production of diffusion in spatially periodic deterministic systems, Physical Review E 66 (2002) 026110 (9 pages); 
    preprint nlin.CD/0203046.