Kac’s ring: Entropy and Poincaré recurrence

We study the entropy of an N -site Kac ring in a non-equilibrium state. As the system dynamically evolves towards equilibrium and eventually to the initial state exhibiting Poincaré recurrence, we see that the entropy saturates over a period of time which is large for large N . At about the time of order N , the system starts to return to its initial state. We show that there is indeed a perfect “recurrence of statistical fluctuations”, which we are able to explore, as Kac’s ring possesses a finite recurrence time. Entropy is shown here to be a periodic function of the Poincaré recurrence time.