Weyl-flow and the conformally symplectic structure of thermostatted billiards: The problem of the hyperbolicity

The highly complex nature of the transport in thermostatted billiards has been of interest in the last few decades because of industrial and medical applications. The onset of hyperbolic dynamics (deterministic chaos) in such a billiard has evidenced an interesting stabilization of the transport properties, especially in microporous media. Recently, different mathematical methods have been developed for establishing hyperbolicity in thermostatted billiards, among these, the Weyl-flow and the conformally symplectic structure techniques.This paper deals with analytical investigations on the possible hyperbolic nature of two thermostatted billiards: The nonequilibrium Ehrenfest gas (NEEG) and the pump model (PM). Despite numerical investigations supporting the idea of their dissipative dynamics, the hyperbolicity of these billiards has not been yet established. The analysis developed in this paper shows how the Weyl-flow technique has failed for NEEG, revealing the necessity to develop new strategies in order to obtain hyperbolicity. On the contrary, we prove that the PM has a conformally symplectic structure, which is the basis for establishing the hyperbolicity of such a hybrid dynamical system.