Date: Thursday, February 22, 2002
Time: 4:00-5:00 pm
Place: Hayes-Healy Hall, 229
Host: Mark S. Alber (Mathematics)

Speaker: Luc Rey-Bellet

From: University of Virginia

Title: Liapunov functions for Hamiltonian systems coupled to heat reservoirs

Abstract
Mechanical systems coupled to heat reservoirs can be reduced under suitable conditions to Markov processes. We show how to construct Liapunov functions for such processes, in particular how to deal with localized states of the mechanical systems. We explain how Liapunov functions can be applied to study various ergodic properties of the system such as (exponential) mixing and also to study large deviations. As an application we discuss the Gallavotti-Cohen fluctuation theorem for the entropy production in the system.