We consider the classical response of a strongly chaotic Hamiltonian system.
The spectrum of such a system consists of discrete complex Ruelle-Pollicott
(RP) resonances which manifest themselves in the behavior of the correlation
and response functions. We interpret the RP resonances as the eigenstates and
eigenvalues of the Fokker-Planck operator obtained by adding an infinitesimal
noise term to the first-order Liouville operator. We demonstrate how the
deterministic expression for the linear response is reproduced in the limit of
vanishing noise. For the second-order response we establish an equivalence of
the spectral decomposition with infinitesimal noise and the long-time
asymptotic expansion for the deterministic case.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur