Chaotic Dynamics

In many problems of quantum chaos the calculation of sums of products of periodic orbit contributions is required. A general method of computation of these sums is proposed for generic integrable models where the summation over periodic orbits is reduced to the summation over integer vectors uniquely associated with periodic orbits. It is demonstrated that in multiple sums over such integer vectors there exist hidden saddle points which permit explicit evaluation of these sums. Saddle point manifolds consist of periodic orbits vectors which are almost mutually parallel. Different problems has been treated by this saddle point method, e.g. Berry's bootstrap relations, mean values of Green function products etc. In particular, it is obtained that suitably defined 2-point correlation form-factor for periodic orbit actions in generic integrable models is proportional to quantum density of states and has peaks at quantum eigenenergies.

Dynamical control of excitable biological systems is often complicated by the difficult and unreliable task of pre-control identification of unstable periodic orbits (UPOs). Here we show that, for both chaotic and nonchaotic systems, UPOs can be located, and their dynamics characterized, during control. Tracking of system nonstationarities emerges naturally from this approach. Such a method is potentially valuable for the control of excitable biological systems, for which pre-control UPO identification is often impractical and nonstationarities (natural or stimulation-induced) are common.

We model the evolution of the concentration field of macromolecules in a symmetric field-flow fractionation (FFF) channel by a one-dimensional advection-diffusion equation. The coefficients are precisely determined from the fluid dynamics. This model gives quantitative predictions of the time of elution of the molecules and the width in time of the concentration pulse. The model is rigorously supported by centre manifold theory. Errors of the derived model are quantified for improved predictions if necessary. The advection-diffusion equation is used to find that the optimal condition in a symmetric FFF for the separation of two species of molecules with similar diffusivities involves a high rate of cross-flow.

The relevance of the algebraic entropy in the study of birational discrete time dynamical systems highlights the need to relate it to other characteristics of these systems. In this letter, two complementary proofs are given that the foliation of the space by invariant curves implies that the algebraic entropy is zero.

The authors investigate the impact of external sources on the pattern formation of concentration profiles of passive tracers in a two-dimensional shear flow. By using the pullback attractor technique for the associated nonautonomous dynamical system, it is shown that a unique time-almost periodic concentration profile exists for time-almost periodic external source.

Using a completely analytic procedure - based on a suitable extension of a classical method - we discuss an approach to the Poincaré-Mel'nikov theory, which can be conveniently applied also to the case of non-hyperbolic critical points, and even if the critical point is located at the infinity. In this paper, we concentrate our attention on the latter case, and precisely on problems described by Kepler-like potentials in one or two degrees of freedom, in the presence of general time-dependent perturbations. We show that the appearance of chaos (possibly including Arnol'd diffusion) can be proved quite easily and in a direct way, without resorting to singular coordinate transformations, such as the McGehee or blowing-up transformations. Natural examples are provided by the classical Gyldén problem, originally proposed in celestial mechanics, but also of interest in different fields, and by the general 3-body problem in classical mechanics.

We construct an approximate renormalization transformation that combines Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM)and renormalization-group techniques, to analyze instabilities in Hamiltonian systems with three degrees of freedom. This scheme is implemented both for isoenergetically nondegenerate and for degenerate Hamiltonians. For the spiral mean frequency vector, we find numerically that the iterations of the transformation on nondegenerate Hamiltonians tend to degenerate ones on the critical surface. As a consequence, isoenergetically degenerate and nondegenerate Hamiltonians belong to the same universality class, and thus the corresponding critical invariant tori have the same type of scaling properties. We numerically investigate the structure of the attracting set on the critical surface and find that it is a strange nonchaotic attractor. We compute exponents that characterize its universality class.

An efficient approach to the calculation of the ϵ -entropy is proposed. The method is based on the idea of looking at the information content of a string of data, by analyzing the signal only at the instants when the fluctuations are larger than a certain threshold ϵ , i.e., by looking at the exit-time statistics. The practical and theoretical advantages of our method with respect to the usual one are shown by the examples of a deterministic map and a self-affine stochastic process.

An experimental test of a large fluctuation theorem is performed on a chain of coupled ``cat maps''. Our interest is focused on the behavior of a subsystem of this chain. A local entropy creation rate is defined and we show that the local fluctuation theorem derived in [G1] is experimentally observable already for small subsystems.

There exist measuring devices where an analog input is converted into a digital output. Such converters can have a nonlinear internal dynamics. We show how measurements with such converting devices can be understood using concepts from symbolic dynamics. Our approach is based on a nonlinear one-to-one mapping between the analog input and the digital output of the device. We analyze the Bernoulli shift and the tent map which are realized in specific analog/digital converters. Furthermore, we discuss the sources of errors that are inevitable in physical realizations of such systems and suggest methods for error reduction.