Thermalization of a Brownian particle via coupling to low-dimensional chaos

It is shown that a paradigm of classical statistical mechanics — the thermalization of a Brownian particle — has a low-dimensional, deterministic analogue: when a heavy, slow system is coupled to fast deterministic chaos, the resultant forces drive the slow degrees of freedom toward a state of statistical equilibrium with the fast degrees. This illustrates how concepts useful in statistical mechanics may apply in situations where low-dimensional chaos exists.