EXIT TIMES AND CHAOTIC TRANSPORT IN HAMILTONIAN-SYSTEMS

A new statistical diagnostic tool for chaotic transport in Hamiltonian systems is proposed. The method, based on the concept of exit times, has an advantage over the calculation of diffusion coefficients in that it remains valid for nondiffusive transport processes. This method is tested on the Chirikov-Taylor standard map: One finds that it is more robust than the usual diffusion coefficient D and conveys the same information as D when the latter is meaningful, for all values of the nonlinearity parameter K.