Regular And Stochastic Motion

Regular and Stochastic Motion

This book treats stochastic motion in nonlinear oscillator systems. It describes a rapidly growing field of nonlinear mechanics with applications to a number of areas in science and engineering, including astronomy, plasma physics, statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. The main em phasis is on intrinsic stochasticity in Hamiltonian systems, where the stochastic motion is generated by the dynamics itself and not by external noise. However, the effects of noise in modifying the intrinsic motion are also considered. A thorough introduction to chaotic motion in dissipative systems is given in the final chapter. Although the roots of the field are old, dating back to the last century when Poincare and others attempted to formulate a theory for nonlinear perturbations of planetary orbits, it was new mathematical results obtained in the 1960's, together with computational results obtained using high speed computers, that facilitated our new treatment of the subject. Since the new methods partly originated in mathematical advances, there have been two or three mathematical monographs exposing these developments. However, these monographs employ methods and language that are not readily accessible to scientists and engineers, and also do not give explicit tech niques for making practical calculations. In our treatment of the material, we emphasize physical insight rather than mathematical rigor. We present practical methods for describing the motion, for determining the transition from regular to stochastic behavior, and for characterizing the stochasticity. We rely heavily on numerical computations to illustrate the methods and to validate them.

Regular and Stochastic Motion

Regular and Chaotic Dynamics

What's in a name? The original title of our book, Regular and Stochastic Motion, was chosen to emphasize Hamiltonian dynamics and the physical motion of bodies. The new edition is more evenhanded, with considerably more discussion of dissipative systems and dynamics not involving physical motion. To reflect this partial change of emphasis, we have substituted the more general terms in our title. The common usage of the new terms clarifies the emphasis of the book. The main change in the book has been to expand the sections on dissipative dynamics, including discussion of renormalization, circle maps, intermittancy, crises, transient chaos, multifractals, reconstruction, and coupled mapping systems. These topics were either mainly in the mathemati cal literature or essentially unstudied when our first edition was written. The volume of work in these areas has surpassed that in Hamiltonian dynamics within the past few years. We have also made changes in the Hamiltonian sections, adding many new topics such as more general transformation and stability theory, connected stochasticity in two-dimensional maps, converse KAM theory, new topics in diffusion theory, and an approach to equilibrium in many dimensions. Other sections such as mapping models have been revised to take into account new perspectives. We have also corrected a number of misprints and clarified various arguments with the help of colleagues and students, some of whom we acknowledge below. We have again chosen not to treat quantum chaos, partly due to our own lack ofacquaintance with the subject.