Universality for the breakup of invariant tori in Hamiltonian flows

In this article, we describe a new renormalization-group scheme for analyzing the breakup of invariant tori for Hamiltonian systems with two degrees of freedom. The transformation, which acts on Hamiltonians that are quadratic in the action variables, combines a rescaling of phase space and a partial elimination of irrelevant (nonresonant) frequencies. It is implemented numerically for the case applying to golden invariant tori. We find a nontrivial fixed point and compute the corresponding scaling and critical indices. If one compares flows to maps in the canonical way, our results are consistent with existing data on the breakup of golden invariant circles for area-preserving maps.