No Arabic abstract
We show that the presence of KAM islands in nonhyperbolic chaotic scattering has deep implications on the unpredictability of open Hamiltonian systems. When the energy of the system increases the particles escape faster. For this reason the boundary of the exit basins becomes thinner and less fractal. Hence, we could expect a monotonous decrease in the unpredictability as well as in the fractal dimension. However, within the nonhyperbolic regime, fluctuations in the basin entropy have been uncovered. The reason is that when increasing the energy, both the size and geometry of the KAM islands undergo abrupt changes. These fluctuations do not appear within the hyperbolic regime. Hence, the fluctuations in the basin entropy allow us to ascertain the hyperbolic or nonhyperbolic nature of a system. In this manuscript we have used continuous and discrete open Hamiltonian systems in order to show the relevant role of the KAM islands on the unpredictability, and the utility of the basin entropy to analyze this kind of systems.
The noise-enhanced trapping is a surprising phenomenon that has already been studied in chaotic scattering problems where the noise affects the physical variables but not the parameters of the system. Following this research, in this work we provide strong numerical evidence to show that an additional mechanism that enhances the trapping arises when the noise influences the energy of the system. For this purpose, we have included a source of Gaussian white noise in the Henon-Heiles system, which is a paradigmatic example of open Hamiltonian system. For a particular value of the noise intensity, some trajectories decrease their energy due to the stochastic fluctuations. This drop in energy allows the particles to spend very long transients in the scattering region, increasing their average escape times. This result, together with the previously studied mechanisms, points out the generality of the noise-enhanced trapping in chaotic scattering problems.
We use the Smaller Alignment Index (SALI) to distinguish rapidly and with certainty between ordered and chaotic motion in Hamiltonian flows. This distinction is based on the different behavior of the SALI for the two cases: the index fluctuates around non--zero values for ordered orbits, while it tends rapidly to zero for chaotic orbits. We present a detailed study of SALIs behavior for chaotic orbits and show that in this case the SALI exponentially converges to zero, following a time rate depending on the difference of the two largest Lyapunov exponents $sigma_1$, $sigma_2$ i.e. $SALI propto e^{-(sigma_1-sigma_2)t}$. Exploiting the advantages of the SALI method, we demonstrate how one can rapidly identify even tiny regions of order or chaos in the phase space of Hamiltonian systems of 2 and 3 degrees of freedom.
We study the chaotic behavior of multidimensional Hamiltonian systems in the presence of nonlinearity and disorder. It is known that any localized initial excitation in a large enough linear disordered system spreads for a finite amount of time and then halts forever. This phenomenon is called Anderson localization (AL). What happens to AL when nonlinearity is introduced is an interesting question which has been considered in several studies over the past decades. However, the characteristics and the asymptotic fate of such evolutions still remain an issue of intense debate due to their computational difficulty, especially in systems of more than one spatial dimension. As the spreading of initially localized wave packets is a non-equilibrium thermalization process related to the ergodic and chaotic properties of the system, in our work we investigate the properties of chaos studying the behavior of observables related to the systems tangent dynamics. In particular, we consider the disordered discrete nonlinear Schrodinger (DDNLS) equation of one (1D) and two (2D) spatial dimensions. We present detailed computations of the time evolution of the systems maximum Lyapunov exponent (MLE--$Lambda$), and the related deviation vector distribution (DVD). We find that although the systems MLE decreases in time following a power law $t^{alpha_Lambda}$ with $alpha_Lambda <0$ for both the weak and strong chaos regimes, no crossover to the behavior $Lambda propto t^{-1}$ (which is indicative of regular motion) is observed. In addition, the analysis of the DVDs reveals the existence of random fluctuations of chaotic hotspots with increasing amplitudes inside the excited part of the wave packet, which assist in homogenizing chaos and contribute to the thermalization of more lattice sites.
We report on transcritical bifurcations of periodic orbits in non-integrable two-dimensional Hamiltonian systems. We discuss their existence criteria and some of their properties using a recent mathematical description of transcritical bifurcations in families of symplectic maps. We then present numerical examples of transcritical bifurcations in a class of generalized Henon-Heiles Hamiltonians and illustrate their stabilities and unfoldings under various perturbations of the Hamiltonians. We demonstrate that for Hamiltonians containing straight-line librating orbits, the transcritical bifurcation of these orbits is the typical case which occurs also in the absence of any discrete symmetries, while their isochronous pitchfork bifurcation is an exception. We determine the normal forms of both types of bifurcations and derive the uniform approximation required to include transcritically bifurcating orbits in the semiclassical trace formula for the density of states of the quantum Hamiltonian. We compute the coarse-grained density of states in a specific example both semiclassically and quantum mechanically and find excellent agreement of the results.
The variational method is very important in mathematical and theoretical physics because it allows us to describe the natural systems by physical quantities independently from the frame of reference used. A global and statistical approach have been introduced starting from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, obtaining the principle of maximum entropy generation for the open systems. This principle is a consequence of the lagrangian approach to the open systems. Here it will be developed a general approach to obtain the thermodynamic hamiltonian for the dynamical study of the open systems. It follows that the irreversibility seems to be the fundamental phenomenon which drives the evolution of the states of the open systems.