Poincaré recurrence and measure of hyperbolic and nonhyperbolic chaotic attractors.

We study Poincaré recurrence of chaotic attractors for regions of finite size. Contrary to the standard case, where the size of the recurrent regions tends to zero, the measure is no longer supported solely by unstable periodic orbits of finite length inside it, but also by other special recurrent trajectories, located outside that region. The presence of the latter leads to a deviation of the distribution of the Poincaré first return times from a Poissonian. Consequently, by taking into account the contribution of these special recurrent trajectories, a corrected estimate of the measure is obtained. This has wide experimental implications, as in the laboratory all returns can exclusively be observed for regions of finite size, and only unstable periodic orbits of finite length can be detected.