A note on diffusion limits of chaotic skew-product flows

Abstract

We provide an explicit rigorous derivation of a diffusion limit—a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with additive noise—from a deterministic skew-product flow. This flow is assumed to exhibit time-scale separation and has the form of a slowly evolving system driven by a fast chaotic flow. Under mild assumptions on the fast flow, we prove convergence to a SDE as the time-scale separation grows. In contrast to existing work, we do not require the flow to have good mixing properties. As a consequence, our results incorporate a large class of fast flows, including the classical Lorenz equations.

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