The rate of entropy increase at the edge of chaos

Abstract

Under certain conditions, the rate of increase of the statistical entropy of a simple, fully chaotic, conservative system is known to be given by a single number, characteristic of this system, the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy rate. This connection is here generalized to a simple dissipative system, the logistic map, and especially to the chaos threshold of the latter, the edge of chaos. It is found that, in the edge-of-chaos case, the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy is not appropriate. Instead, the non-extensive entropy $S_q\equiv \frac{1-{\sum }_{i=1}^W{p}_i^q}{q-1}$, must be used. The latter contains a parameter q, the entropic index which must be given a special value $q^{\ast }\ne 1$ (for q=1 one recovers the usual entropy) characteristic of the edge-of-chaos under consideration. The same q^* enters also in the description of the sensitivity to initial conditions, as well as in that of the multifractal spectrum of the attractor.

Comments: 6 pages, Latex, 4 figures included, final version accepted for publication in Physics Letters A