Transport in Hamiltonian systems

Technical Report · Thu Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 1983

OSTI ID:5734618

MacKay, R S; Meiss, J D; Percival, I C

We develop a theory of transport in Hamiltonian systems in the context of iteration of area-preserving maps. Invariant closed curves present complete barriers to transport, but in regions without such curves there are still invariant Cantor sets named cantori, which appear to form major obstacles. The flux through the gaps of the cantori is given by Mather's differences in action. This gives useful bounds on transport between regions, and a universal scaling law for one-parameter families when a curve has just broken, which agree well with numerical experiments of Chirikov and explain an apparent disagreement with results of Greene. By dividing the phase space into regions separated by the strongest barriers, and assuming the motion is mixing within them, we derive a global picture of transport, which can be used, for example, to predict confinement times and to explain longtime tails in the decay of correlations.

• Research Organization: Texas Univ., Austin (USA). Inst. for Fusion Studies; Queen Mary Coll., London (UK)
• DOE Contract Number: FG05-80ET53088
• OSTI ID: 5734618
• Report Number(s): DOE/ET/53088-109; ON: DE84000047
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
700105* -- Fusion Energy-- Plasma Research-- Plasma Kinetics-Theoretical-- (-1987)
CONFINEMENT TIME
HAMILTONIANS
MAPPING
MATHEMATICAL OPERATORS
PLASMA
QUANTUM OPERATORS
SCALING LAWS
TRANSPORT THEORY