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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Chaos, ergodicity, and the thermodynamics of lower-dimensional time-independent Hamiltonian systems
Henry E Kandrup1, Ioannis V Sideris, Courtlandt L Bohn
1Department of Astronomy, Institute for Fundamental Theory, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA. kandrup@astro.ufl.edu
Abstract:
This paper uses the assumptions of ergodicity and a microcanonical distribution to compute estimates of the largest Lyapunov exponents in lower-dimensional Hamiltonian systems. That the resulting estimates are in reasonable agreement with the actual values computed numerically corroborates the intuition that chaos in such systems can be understood as arising generically from a parametric instability and that this instability may be modeled by a stochastic-oscillator equation [cf. Casetti, Clementi, and Pettini, Phys. Rev. E 54, 5969 (1996)], linearized perturbations of a chaotic orbit satisfying a harmonic-oscillator equation with a randomly varying frequency.
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