Non-hyperbolicity in large-scale dynamics of a chaotic system

The dynamics of many important high-dimensional dynamical systems are both chaotic and complex, meaning that strong reducing hypotheses are required to understand the dynamics. The highly influential chaotic hypothesis of Gallavotti and Cohen states that the large-scale dynamics of high-dimensional systems are effectively hyperbolic, which implies many felicitous statistical properties. We demonstrate, contrary to the chaotic hypothesis, the existence of non-hyperbolic large-scale dynamics in a mean-field coupled system. To do this we reduce the system to its thermodynamic limit, which we approximate numerically with a Chebyshev basis transfer operator discretisation. This enables us to obtain a high precision estimate of a homoclinic tangency, implying a failure of hyperbolicity. Robust non-hyperbolic behaviour is expected under perturbation. As a result, the chaotic hypothesis should not be {\it a priori} assumed to hold in all systems, and a better understanding of the domain of its validity is required.