Chaos and Noise

Abstract: Simple dynamical systems -- with a small number of degrees of freedom -- can behave in a complex manner due to the presence of chaos. Such systems are most often (idealized) limiting cases of more realistic situations. Isolating a small number of dynamical degrees of freedom in a realistically coupled system generically yields reduced equations with terms that can have a stochastic interpretation. In situations where both noise and chaos can potentially exist, it is not immediately obvious how Lyapunov exponents, key to characterizing chaos, should be properly defined. In this paper, we show how to do this in a class of well-defined noise-driven dynamical systems, derived from an underlying Hamiltonian model.