Saturday 10 January 2015

statistical mechanics - What would happen if energy was conserved but phase space volume wasn't? (and vice-versa)


I'm trying to understand the relationship between the two conservation laws. As I understand, Liouville's result is a weaker condition: it relies merely on the particular form assumed by Hamilton's equations and their correspondent hamiltonian vector field, while conservation of energy in the hamiltonian formalism requires the Hamiltonian to be explicitly independent of time. I'd go as far as saying it's a deeper principle in this respect.



On the other hand, its direct implications for the trajectories and the motion of particles are quite elusive to me. I've seen mostly physical systems where both energy and phase space volume get conserved and I've seen a bunch of dissipative systems, say a damped oscillator, where both of them aren't conserved. I'm looking for examples somewhere in the middle in order to capture their respective uniqueness: phase space volume preservation but no energy conservation, a hypothetical situation where energy is conserved but Liouville's theorem doesn't hold and so on. I'd rather know an example out of classical mechanics than statistical mechanics, which I know it's where Liouville's theorem comes particularly in handy but I know almost nothing about it, but please go ahead if you think it can shed some light on the matter.




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