Invariant curves and explosion of periodic Islands in systems of piecewise rotations

Copyright © 2005 Society for Industrial and Applied MathematicsInvertible piecewise isometric maps (PWIs) of the plane, in spite of their apparent simplicity, can show a remarkable number of dynamical features analogous to those found in nonlinear smooth area preserving maps. There is a natural partition of the phase space into an exceptional set, ⋶, consisting of the closure of the set of points whose orbits accumulate on discontinuities of the map, and its complement. In this paper we examine a family of noninvertible PWIs on the plane that consist of rotations on each of four atoms, each of which is a quadrant. We show that this family gives examples of global attractors with a variety of geometric structures. On some of these attractors, there appear to be nonsmooth invariant curves within ⋶ that form barriers to ergodicity of any invariant measure supported on ⋶. These invariant curves are observed to appear on perturbations of an “integrable” case where the exceptional set is a union of annuli and it decomposes into a one-dimensional family of interval exchange maps that may be minimal but nonergodic. We have no adequate theoretical explanation for the curves in the nonsmooth case, but they appear to come into existence at the same times as an explosion of periodic islands near where the interval exchanges used to be located. We exhibit another example—a piecewise rotation on the plane with two atoms that also appears to have nonsmooth invariant curves

Cutting and Shuffling a Line Segment: Mixing by Interval Exchange Transformations

We present a computational study of finite-time mixing of a line segment by cutting and shuffling. A family of one-dimensional interval exchange transformations is constructed as a model system in which to study these types of mixing processes. Illustrative examples of the mixing behaviors, including pathological cases that violate the assumptions of the known governing theorems and lead to poor mixing, are shown. Since the mathematical theory applies as the number of iterations of the map goes to infinity, we introduce practical measures of mixing (the percent unmixed and the number of intermaterial interfaces) that can be computed over given (finite) numbers of iterations. We find that good mixing can be achieved after a finite number of iterations of a one-dimensional cutting and shuffling map, even though such a map cannot be considered chaotic in the usual sense and/or it may not fulfill the conditions of the ergodic theorems for interval exchange transformations. Specifically, good shuffling can occur with only six or seven intervals of roughly the same length, as long as the rearrangement order is an irreducible permutation. This study has implications for a number of mixing processes in which discontinuities arise either by construction or due to the underlying physics.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, ws-ijbc class; accepted for publication in International Journal of Bifurcation and Chao

Embeddings of interval exchange transformations into planar piecewise isometries

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.Although piecewise isometries (PWIs) are higher dimensional generalizations of one dimensional interval exchange transformations (IETs), their generic dynamical properties seem to be quite different. In this paper we consider embeddings of IET dynamics into PWI with a view to better understanding their similarities and differences. We derive some necessary conditions for existence of such embeddings using combinatorial, topological and measure theoretic properties of IETs. In particular, we prove that continuous embeddings of minimal 2-IETs into orientation preserving PWIs are necessarily trivial and that any 3-PWI has at most one non-trivially continuously embedded minimal 3-IET with the same underlying permutation. Finally, we introduce a family of 4-PWIs with apparent abundance of invariant nonsmooth fractal curves supporting IETs, that limit to a trivial embedding of an IET