Increase in entropy and time irreversibility in Hamiltonian dynamics (Q2047684)

If not in the explicit thermodynamic context, the notion of entropy or entropy-like functions can be introduced in many ways, and always remains purpose-dependent. In particular, if carefully selected, these functions may quantify various signatures of (growing) disorder, and thence an approach to a preselected ``equilibrium state''. In many systems, one identifies analogues (we call them surrogates) of thermodynamic state functions, and some of associated evolution equations that mimic the thermodynamic behavior. For complex systems, a clever choice of the entropy and/or free anargy analog, may lead to interesting conclusions about their behavior in the large time asymptotic. In the present paper, the authors decided to consider a relatively simple, but nontrivial system, the monatomic van der Waals gas whose atoms are in the ground state. The deduced canonical Hamilton equations allow calculating the rate of change in the surrogate entropy of this dynamic system. For the physically interesting case where the system evolution leads to equilibrium, the entropy and its rate of change are functionals of the solution of dynamic equations for the density. A numerical solution of these equations gives a monotonic growth of the entropy (for a finite evolution time). We point out that working with surrogate thermodynamic functions, involves unusual (from thermal point of view) objects. Namely an elliptic equation with the ``wrong'' sign of the analogue of the squared speed of sound, rather than a hyperbolic equation, is obtained for the asymptotic evolution of the density deviation from the equilibrium value. It is the reason why the time reversibility of the solution is lost.