Unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) are a valuable tool for studying chaotic dynamical systems. They allow one to extract information from a system and to distill its dynamical structure. We consider here the Lorenz 1963 model with the classic parameters value and decompose its dynamics in terms of UPOs. We investigate how a chaotic orbit can be approximated in terms of UPOs. At each instant, we rank the UPOs according to their proximity to the position of the orbit in the phase space. We study this process from two different perspectives. First, we find that, somewhat unexpectedly, longer period UPOs overwhelmingly provide the best local approximation to the trajectory, even if our UPO-detecting algorithm severely undersamples them. Second, we construct a finite-state Markov chain by studying the scattering of the forward trajectory between the neighbourhood of the various UPOs. Each UPO and its neighbourhood are taken as a possible state of the system. We then study the transitions between the different states. Through the analysis of the subdominant eigenvectors of the corresponding stochastic matrix we provide a novel interpretation of the mixing processes occurring in the system by taking advantage of the concept of quasi-invariant sets.
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