Universal Exponent for Transport in Mixed Hamiltonian Dynamics

Abstract

We compute universal distributions for the transition probabilities of a Markov model for transport in the mixed phase space of area-preserving maps and verify that the survival probability distribution for trajectories near an infinite island-around-island hierarchy exhibits, on average, a power law decay with exponent $\gamma = 1.57$. This exponent agrees with that found from simulations of the H\'enon and Chirikov-Taylor maps. This provides evidence that the Meiss-Ott Markov tree model describes the transport for mixed systems.