Performance of Lagrangian Descriptors and their variants in incompressible flows

Abstract

The method of Lagrangian descriptors has been already applied in many different contexts, specially in geophysical flows. In this paper we analyze the performance of this methodology in incompressible flows. We demonstrate that barriers to transport are not always coded by singular features of the $M$ function as Mancho, Wiggins and their co-workers conjectured. The techniques presented here are not restricted to incompressible flows. In fact, by our approach, one can infer that the method of Lagrangian descriptors is not useful in most linear systems.