The dynamical and thermodynamical origin of dissipative chaos

Abstract: Chaos is usually referred to the sensitivity to initial conditions in which the nonlinearity plays a crucial role. Beyond such a mathematical description, the understanding of the underlying physical origin of the chaos is still not very clear. Here we study the dissipative chaos from the perspective of the nonequilibrium dynamics. This was not fully investigated in the traditional chaos theory, despite of the Lorenz's original discovery of chaos from the nonequilibrium atmosphere. We found that the nonequilibriumness as the degree of detailed balance breaking can be quantified by the appearance of the steady state probability flux in the state space. We uncovered that the dynamical origin of the onset and offset of the dissipative chaos such as Lorentz attractor is from the sudden appearance and disappearance of such nonequilibrium flux. We also uncovered that the dissipation associated with the flux quantified by the entropy production rate gives the thermodynamical origin of dissipative chaos. The sharp changes in the degree of nonequilibriumness by the flux and the entropy production rate also provide alternative quantitative indicators for the onset and offset of the dissipative chaos.