Transport in Hamiltonian systems with slowly changing phase space structure

Abstract

Transport in Hamiltonian systems with weak chaotic perturbations has been much studied in the past. In this paper, we introduce a new class of problems: transport in Hamiltonian systems with slowly changing phase space structure that are not order one perturbations of a given Hamiltonian. This class of problems is very important for many applications, for instance in celestial mechanics. As an example, we study a class of one-dimensional Hamiltonians that depend explicitly on time and on stochastic external parameters. The variations of the external parameters are responsible for a distortion of the phase space structures: chaotic, weakly chaotic and regular sets change with time. We show that theoretical predictions of transport rates can be made in the limit where the variations of the stochastic parameters are very slow compared to the Hamiltonian dynamics. Exact asymptotic results can be obtained in the classical case where the Hamiltonian dynamics is integrable for fixed values of the parameters. For the more interesting chaotic Hamiltonian dynamics case, we show that two mechanisms contribute to the transport. For some range of the parameter variations, one mechanism -called transport by migration together with the mixing regions - is dominant. We are then able to model transport in phase space by a Markov model, the local diffusion model, and to give reasonably good transport estimates.