Skip to main content
Article
Chaotic Escape From an Open Vase-Shaped Cavity. II. Topological Theory
Physical Review E
  • Jaison Allen Novick, William & Mary
  • John B. Delos, William & Mary
Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Physics
Pub Date
1-1-2012
Publisher
American Physical Society
Abstract

We present part II of a study of chaotic escape from an open two-dimensional vase-shaped cavity. A surface of section reveals that the chaotic dynamics is controlled by a homoclinic tangle, the union of stable and unstable manifolds attached to a hyperbolic fixed point. Furthermore, the surface of section rectifies escape-time graphs into sequences of escape segments; each sequence is called an epistrophe. Some of the escape segments (and therefore some of the epistrophes) are forced by the topology of the dynamics of the homoclinic tangle. These topologically forced structures can be predicted using the method called homotopic lobe dynamics (HLD). HLD takes a finite length of the unstable manifold and a judiciously altered topology and returns a set of symbolic dynamical equations that encode the folding and stretching of the unstable manifold. We present three applications of this method to three different lengths of the unstable manifold. Using each set of dynamical equations, we compute minimal sets of escape segments associated with the unstable manifold, and minimal sets associated with a burst of trajectories emanating from a point on the vase's boundary. The topological theory predicts most of the early escape segments that are found in numerical computations.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.016206
Disciplines
Citation Information
Jaison Allen Novick and John B. Delos. "Chaotic Escape From an Open Vase-Shaped Cavity. II. Topological Theory" Physical Review E Vol. 85 Iss. 1 (2012)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/john-delos/18/