Lyapunov Modes in Hard-Disk Systems

We consider simulations of a 2-dimensional gas of hard disks in a rectangular container and study the Lyapunov spectrum near the vanishing Lyapunov exponents. To this spectrum are associated ``eigen-directions'', called Lyapunov modes. We carefully analyze these modes and show how they are naturally associated with vector fields over the container. We also show that the Lyapunov exponents, and the coupled dynamics of the modes (where it exists) follow linear laws, whose coefficients only depend on the density of the gas, but not on aspect ratio and very little on the boundary conditions.