A geometric mechanism for diffusion in Hamiltonian systems overcoming the large gap problem: heuristics and rigorous verification on a model.

We introduce a geometric mechanism for di?usion in a priori unstable nearly integrable dynamical systems. It is based on the observation that resonances, besides destroying the primary KAM tori, create secondary tori and tori of lower dimension. We argue that these objects created by resonances can...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Delshams Valdés, Amadeu|||0000-0003-4134-8882, Llave Canosa, Rafael de la, Martínez-Seara Alonso, M. Teresa|||0000-0001-8421-8717
Format: article
Publication Date:2003
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/872
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/872
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Hamiltonian dynamical systems
Lagrangian functions
Arnol'd diffusion,
instability
heteroclinic connections
Hamilton, Sistemes de
Lagrange, Funcions de
Classificació AMS::37 Dynamical systems and ergodic theory::37J Finite-dimensional Hamiltonian, Lagrangian, contact, and nonholonomic systems
Classificació AMS::70 Mechanics of particles and systems::70H Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics
Description
Summary:We introduce a geometric mechanism for di?usion in a priori unstable nearly integrable dynamical systems. It is based on the observation that resonances, besides destroying the primary KAM tori, create secondary tori and tori of lower dimension. We argue that these objects created by resonances can be incorporated in transition chains taking the place of the destroyed primary KAM tori. We establish rigorously the existence of this mechanism in a simple model that has been studied before. The main technique is to develop a toolkit to study, in a unified way, tori of different topologies and their invariant manifolds, their intersections as well as shadowing properties of these bi-asymptotic orbits. This toolkit is based on extending and unifying standard techniques. A new tool used here is the scattering map of normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds. The model considered is a one-parameter family, which for " = 0 is an integrable system. We give a small number of explicit conditions the jet of order 3 of the family that, if verified imply diffusion. The conditions are just that some explicitely constructed functionals do not vanish identically or have non-degenerate critical points, etc. An attractive feature of the mechanism is that the transition chains are shorter in the places where the heuristic intuition and numerical experimentation suggests that the diffusion is strongest.