The ratchet effect and the transporting islands in the chaotic sea

Abstract

We study directed transport in a classical deterministic dissipative system. We consider the generic case of mixed phase space and show that large ratchet currents can be generated thanks to the presence, in the Hamiltonian limit, of transporting stability islands embedded in the chaotic sea. Due to the simultaneous presence of chaos and dissipation the stationary value of the current is independent of initial conditions, except for initial states with very small measure.