Neighborhoods of periodic orbits and the stationary distribution of a noisy chaotic system.

The finest state-space resolution that can be achieved in a physical dynamical system is limited by the presence of noise. In the weak-noise approximation, the stochastic neighborhoods of deterministic periodic orbits can be computed from distributions stationary under the action of a local Fokker-Planck operator and its adjoint. We derive explicit formulas for widths of these distributions in the case of chaotic dynamics, when the periodic orbits are hyperbolic. The resulting neighborhoods form a basis for functions on the attractor. The global stationary distribution, needed for calculation of long-time expectation values of observables, can be expressed in this basis.