HOMOCLINIC TANGLES - CLASSIFICATION AND APPLICATIONS

Here we develop the Topological Approximation Method (TAM) which gives a new description of the mixing and transport processes in chaotic two-dimensional time-periodic Hamiltonian flows. It is based upon the structure of the homoclinic tangle, and supplies a detailed solution to a transport problem for this class of systems, the characteristics of which are typical to chaotic, yet not ergodic dynamical systems. These characteristics suggest some new criteria for quantifying transport and mixing-hence chaos-in such systems. The results depend on several parameters, which are found by perturbation analysis in the near integrable case, and numerically otherwise. The strength of the method is demonstrated on a simple model. We construct a bifurcation diagram describing the changes in the homoclinic tangle as the physical parameters are varied. From this diagram we find special regions in the parameter space in which we approximate the escape rates from the vicinity of the homoclinic tangle, finding non-trivial self-similar solutions as the forcing magnitude tends to zero. We compare the theoretical predictions with brute force calculations of the escape rates, and obtain satisfactory agreement.