Hamiltonian systems phase-space structure

The quote is from the third volume of Henri Poincare s New Methods of Celestial Mechanics, and is a description of his discovery of homoclinic orbits (see below) in the restricted three-body problem. It is also one of the earliest recorded formal observations that very complicated behavior may be found even in seemingly simple classical Hamiltonian systems. Although Hamiltonian (or conservative) chaos often involves fractal-like phase-space structures, the fractal character is of an altogether different kind from that arising in dissipative systems. An important common thread in the analysis of motion in either kind of dynamical system, however, is that of the stability of orbits. 

The KAM theorem demonstrates the existence of KAM tori when the perturbations to the motion are small. What happens when a nearly integrable Hamiltonian is strongly perturbed For example, with increasing perturbation strength, what is the last KAM torus to be destroyed and how should we characterize the phase space structures when all KAM tori are destroyed Using simple dynamical mapping systems, which can be regarded as Poincare maps in Hamiltonian systems with two DOFs, MacKay, Meiss, and Percival [8,9] and Bensimon and Kadanoff [10] showed that the most robust KAM curve... 

The phase space structure of classical molecular dynamics is extensively used in developing classical reaction rate theory. If the quanmm reaction dynamics can also be viewed from a phase-space perspective, then a quantum reaction rate theory can use a significant amount of the classical language and the quantum-classical correspondence in reaction rate theory can be closely examined. This is indeed possible by use of, for example, the Wigner function approach. For simplicity let us consider a Hamiltonian system with only one DOF. Generalization to many-dimensional systems is straightforward. The Wigner function associated with a density operator /)( / is defined by... 

In this section we will develop the phase-space structure for a broad class of n-DOF Hamiltonian systems that are appropriate for the study of reaction dynamics through a rank-one saddle. For this class of systems we will show that on the energy surface there is always a higher-dimensional version of a saddle (an NHIM [22]) with codimension one (i.e., with dimensionality one less than the energy surface) stable and unstable manifolds. Within a region bounded by the stable and unstable manifolds of the NHIM, we can construct the TS, which is a dynamical surface of no return for the trajectories. Our approach is algorithmic in nature in the sense that we provide a series of steps that can be carried out to locate the NHIM, its stable and unstable manifolds, and the TS, as well as describe all possible trajectories near it. 

Phase-space structure of Hamiltonian systems with multiple degrees of freedom—in particular, normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds (NHlMs), intersections between their stable and unstable manifolds, and the Arnold web. 

A mapping is said to be symplectic or canonical if it preserves the differential form dp A dq which defines the symplectic structure in the phase space. Differential forms provide a geometric interpretation of symplectic-ness in terms of conservation of areas which follows from Liouville s theorem [14]. In one-degree-of-freedom example symplecticness is the preservation of oriented area. An example is the harmonic oscillator where the t-flow is just a rigid rotation and the area is preserved. The area-preserving character of the solution operator holds only for Hamiltonian systems. In more then one-degree-of-freedom examples the preservation of area is symplecticness rather than preservation of volume [5]. 

Since we have discovered the underlying Hamiltonian structure of the QCMD model we are able to apply methods commonly used to construct suitable numerical integrators for Hamiltonian systems. Therefore we transform the QCMD equations (1) into the Liouville formalism. To this end, we introduce a new state z in the phase space, z = and define the nonlinear... 

In the previous section we saw on an example the main steps of a standard statistical mechanical description of an interface. First, we introduce a Hamiltonian describing the interaction between particles. In principle this Hamiltonian is known from the model introduced at a microscopic level. Then we calculate the free energy and the interfacial structure via some approximations. In principle, this approach requires us to explore the overall phase space which is a manifold of dimension 6N equal to the number of degrees of freedom for the total number of particles, N, in the system. 

The basins of attraction of the coexisting CA (strange attractor) and SC are shown in the Fig. 14 for the Poincare crosssection oyf = O.67t(mod27t) in the absence of noise [169]. The value of the maximal Lyapunov exponent for the CA is 0.0449. The presence of the control function effectively doubles the dimension of the phase space (compare (35) and (37)) and changes its geometry. In the extended phase space the attractor is connected to the basin of attraction of the stable limit cycle via an unstable invariant manifold. It is precisely the complexity of the structure of the phase space of the auxiliary Hamiltonian system (37) near the nonhyperbolic attractor that makes it difficult to solve the energy-optimal control problem. 

MD simulations with a constant energy is nothing but Hamiltonian dynamics. Recent accumulation of MD simulations will certainly contribute to our further understanding of Hamiltonian systems, especially in higher dimensions. The purpose of this section is to sketch briefly how the slow relaxation process emerges in the Hamiltonian dynamics, and especially to show that transport properties of phase-space trajectories reflect various underlying invariant structures. 

In this way, the above statement may be acceptable not only in a qualitative level, but the most important implication of the mathematical statement is that the character of freezing has been shown to be quantitatively the same as adiabaticity predicted by the Nekhoroshev estimate in the nearly integrable system. This solves, at least partially, question (iii) posed in the previous section, because the model Hamiltonian [Eq. (1)] just describes the situation where not all the degrees of freedom do not necessarily show adiabaticity but only a limited number of variables, just the energies of two subsystems in this case, are almost frozen. It is true that there may be, in principle, many other possibilities and the proposed one is not a unique way as for the division of phase space into lower-dimensional subspaces, but the separation induced by the internal structure of molecules is the most natural and plausible candidate. 

As we said in the introduction, the crucial question of stability of a dynamical system is related to the structure and density of invariant tori which foliate the phase space. This is in fact the geometrical representation of the Nekhoroshev theorem (1977). We recall that in a quasi-integrable system with Hamiltonian ... 

The advection problem is thus described by a periodically driven non-autonomous Hamiltonian dynamical system. In such case, besides the two spatial dimensions an additional variable is needed to complete the phase space description, which is conveniently taken to be the cyclic temporal coordinate, r = t mod T, representing the phase of the periodic time-dependence of the flow. In time-dependent flows ip is not conserved along the trajectories, hence trajectories are no longer restricted to the streamlines. The structure of the trajectories in the phase space can be visualized on a Poincare section that contains the intersection points of the trajectories with a plane corresponding to a specified fixed phase of the flow, tq. On this stroboscopic section the advection dynamics can be defined by the stroboscopic Lagrangian map... 

Thus, the phase space of a mechanical system has a natural symplectic structure, which fact will be used for our further purposes. In our concrete example of a system with two degrees of freedom, the cotangent bundle T M has a structure of a four-dimensional real-analytic symplectic manifold. The motion of the system is described by the Hamiltonian equations sgrad F, where the Hamiltonian F will be thought of as a real analytic function on T M. The Hamiltonian will be taken in the following form F(x,() = K(x,() -f C/(x), where for all x Af the function K(Xf() is a quadratic form in the variables ( T M and the function f(x) depends only on x M. The functions AC(a , f) and l/(x) will be treated as real-analytic on the manifolds T M and Af, respectively. The quadratic form K(x, () is usually identified with the kinetic energy of the system and the function... 

Bifurcation theory studies the changes in the phase space as we vary the parameters of the system. In essence, this is the authentic notion of bifurcation theory proposed originally by Henry Poincare when he studied Hamiltonian systems with one degree of freedom. We must, however, note that this intuitively evident definition is not always sufficient at the contemporary stage of the development of the theory. One needs, in fact, to have an appropriate mathematical foundation to define the notions of the structure of the phase space and the changes in the structure. 

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