Pollicott-Ruelle resonances

The plan of this chapter is the following. Section II gives a summary of the phenomenology of irreversible processes and set up the stage for the results of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics to follow. In Section III, it is explained that time asymmetry is compatible with microreversibility. In Section IV, the concept of Pollicott-Ruelle resonance is presented and shown to break the time-reversal symmetry in the statistical description of the time evolution of nonequilibrium relaxation toward the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. This concept is applied in Section V to the construction of the hydrodynamic modes of diffusion at the microscopic level of description in the phase space of Newton s equations. This framework allows us to derive ab initio entropy production as shown in Section VI. In Section VII, the concept of Pollicott-Ruelle resonance is also used to obtain the different transport coefficients, as well as the rates of various kinetic processes in the framework of the escape-rate theory. The time asymmetry in the dynamical randomness of nonequilibrium systems and the fluctuation theorem for the currents are presented in Section VIII. Conclusions and perspectives in biology are discussed in Section IX. 

IV. POLLICOTT-RUELLE RESONANCES AND TIME-REVERSAL SYMMETRY BREAKING... 

The idea of Pollicott-Ruelle resonances relies on this mechanism of spontaneous breaking of the time-reversal symmetry [20, 21]. The Polhcott-Ruelle resonances are generalized eigenvalues sj of LiouviUian operator associated with decaying eigenstates which are singular in the stable phase-space directions but smooth in the unstable ones ... 

These are the classical analogues of quantum scattering resonances except that these latter ones are associated with the wave eigenfunctions of the energy operator, although the eigenstates of the LiouviUian operator are probability densities or density matrices in quanmm mechanics. Nevertheless, the mathematical method to determine the Pollicott-Ruelle resonances is similar, and they can be obtained as poles of the resolvent of the LiouviUian operator... 

The generalized eigenvalue Sk is a Pollicott-Ruelle resonance associated with the eigenstate k- The hydrodynamic modes can be identified as the eigenstates associated with eigenvalues Sk vanishing with the wavenumber k. 

In the classical limit h - 0, the spectrum of the Landau-von Neumann superoperator tends to the spectrum of the classical Liouvillian operator. If the classical system is mixing, the classical Liouvillian spectrum is always continuous so that we may envisage an analytic continuation to define a discrete spectrum of classical resonances. It has been shown that such classical resonances are given by the zeros of the classical zeta function (2.44) and are called the Pollicott-Ruelle resonances sn(E) [63], These classical Liouvillian resonances characterize exponential decay and relaxation processes in the statistical description of classical systems. The leading Pollicott-Ruelle resonance defines the so-called escape rate of the system,... 

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