Deflection islands

TD 51/03 Segregated Left Turn Lanes and Subsidiary Deflection Islands... 

The complex island structure in Fig. 7 is a consequence of the complicated dynamics of the activated complex. When a trajectory approaches a barrier, it can either escape or be deflected by the barrier. In the latter case, it will return into the well and approach one of the barriers again later, until it finally escapes. If this interpretation is correct, the boundaries of the islands should be given by the separatrices between escaping and nonescaping trajectories, that is, by the time-dependent invariant manifolds described in the previous section. To test this hypothesis, Kawai et al. [40] calculated those separatrices in the vicinity of each saddle point through a normal form expansion. Whenever a trajectory approaches a barrier, the value of the reactive-mode action I is calculated. If the trajectory escapes, it is assigned this value of the action as its escape action . 

There is a Cantor set of trapped trajectories which show up in the deflection functions or in a phase space portrait of the scattering time delays or survival times. This is indicated in Fig. 8 showing the phase space structure at a held strength = 2, where there are no islands of stability. The initial conditions of those trajectories with exactly two zeros are marked black, the white regions in between correspond to trajectories with three or more zeros. A break-down of these regions according to the number of zeros reveals self-similar fractal structure [62]. 

J.Y. Pan, P. Lin, F. Maseeh, S.D. Sen-turia, Verification of FEM analysis of load-deflection methods for measuring mechanical properties of thin films, 1990 Sdid-State Sensor and Actuator Workshop, Hilton Head Island, SC, 1990. 

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