Energy transfer in a fast-slow Hamiltonian system (Q647380)

The main idea of this investigation is to derive macroscopic equations from a Hamiltonian microscopic dynamics in the case of weakly coupled systems. The authors consider a microscopic dynamics determined by a (classical) Hamiltonian describing a finite number of weakly interacting strongly chaotic systems. Or, more precisely, a finite region of a lattice of weakly interacting geodesic flows on manifolds of negative curvature is considered and the following strategy to derive a macroscopic evolution is employed. First, looking at times for which there is an effective energy exchange between interacting systems, take the limit for the strength of the interaction going to zero to obtain a self-contained equation describing the evolution of the energies only. (The authors call such an equation mesoscopic since most of the degrees of freedom have been averaged out.) Secondly, one performs on such a mesoscopic equation a thermodynamic limit to obtain a macroscopic evolution. In other words, the authors show that, when rescaling interactions and time appropriately, the energies of the flows evolve according to a nonlinear diffusion equation.