Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | Prigogine, Henin and the author have introduced the concept of subdynamics to study the behaviour of large systems. The usual thermodynamic description of such systems can be formulated in a subspace οP{cyrillic} of the Liouville space. For homogeneous systems, the leading or privileged elements in this subspace are the diagonal or vacuum components of the density matrix. The structure of the subspaces associated with privileged elements which are off-diagonal elements of the density matrix, or correlations, is similarly analyzed. To each type of correlation, one can associate a subspace and a subdynamics. The elements of the transformation theory which extends to dissipative systems the theory of unitary transformations of usual quantum mechanics, are expressed in terms of the operators which characterize the structure of the various subspaces. © 1973. |
