From Hamiltonian chaos to Maxwell's Demon.

The problem of the existence of Maxwell's Demon (MD) is formulated for systems with dynamical chaos. Property of stickiness of individual trajectories, anomalous distribution of the Poincare recurrence time, and anomalous (non-Gaussian) transport for a typical system with Hamiltonian chaos results in a possibility to design a situation equivalent to the MD operation. A numerical example demonstrates a possibility to set without expenditure of work a thermodynamically non-equilibrium state between two contacted domains of the phase space lasting for an arbitrarily long time. This result offers a new view of the Hamiltonian chaos and its role in the foundation of statistical mechanics. (c) 1995 American Institute of Physics.