A new class of integrable Lotka–Volterra systems

A parameter-dependent class of Hamiltonian (generalized) Lotka–Volterra systems is considered. We prove that this class contains Liouville integrable as well as superintegrable cases according to particular choices of the parameters. We determine sufficient conditions which result in integrable behavior, while we numerically explore the complementary cases, where these analytically derived conditions are not satisfied

Energy transmission in Hamiltonian systems of globally interacting particles with Klein-Gordon on-site potentials

We consider a family of 1-dimensional Hamiltonian systems consisting of a large number of particles with on-site potentials and global (long range) interactions. The particles are initially at rest at the equilibrium position, and are perturbed sinusoidally at one end using Dirichlet data, while at the other end we place an absorbing boundary to simulate a semi-infinite medium. Using such a lattice with quadratic particle interactions and Klein-Gordon type on-site potential, we use a parameter 0 ≤ α < ∞as a measure of the “length” of interactions, and show that there is a sharp threshold above which energy is transmitted in the form of large amplitude nonlinear modes, as long as driving frequencies Ω lie in the forbidden band-gap of the system. This process is called nonlinear supratransmission and is investigated here numerically to show that it occurs at higher amplitudes the longer the range of interactions, reaching a maximum at a value α = αmax . 1.5 that depends on Ω. Below this αmax supratransmission thresholds decrease sharply to values lower than the nearest neighbor α = ∞ limit. We give a plausible argument for this phenomenon and conjecture that similar results are present in related systems such as the sine-Gordon, the nonlinear Klein-Gordon and the double sine-Gordon type

Weak chaos detection in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-α\alpha system using qq-Gaussian statistics

We study numerically statistical distributions of sums of orbit coordinates, viewed as independent random variables in the spirit of the Central Limit Theorem, in weakly chaotic regimes associated with the excitation of the first ($k=1$) and last ($k=N$) linear normal modes of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-$\alpha$ system under fixed boundary conditions. We show that at low energies ($E=0.19$), when the $k=1$ linear mode is excited, chaotic diffusion occurs characterized by distributions that are well approximated for long times ($t>10^9$) by a $q$-Gaussian Quasi-Stationary State (QSS) with $q\approx1.4$. On the other hand, when the $k=N$ mode is excited at the same energy, diffusive phenomena are \textit{absent} and the motion is quasi-periodic. In fact, as the energy increases to $E=0.3$, the distributions in the former case pass through \textit{shorter} $q$-Gaussian states and tend rapidly to a Gaussian (i.e. $q\rightarrow 1$) where equipartition sets in, while in the latter we need to reach to E=4 to see a \textit{sudden transition} to Gaussian statistics, without any passage through an intermediate QSS. This may be explained by different energy localization properties and recurrence phenomena in the two cases, supporting the view that when the energy is placed in the first mode weak chaos and "sticky" dynamics lead to a more gradual process of energy sharing, while strong chaos and equipartition appear abruptly when only the last mode is initially excited.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, submitted for publication to International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. In honor of Prof. Tassos Bountis' 60th birthda

Extensive packet excitations in FPU and Toda lattices

At low energies, the excitation of low-frequency packets of normal modes in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) and in the Toda model leads to exponentially localized energy profiles which resemble staircases and are identified by a slope σ that depends logarithmically on the specific energy ε=E/N . Such solutions are found to lie on stable lower-dimensional tori, named q-tori. At higher energies there is a sharp transition of the system's localization profile to a straight-line one, determined by an N-dependent slope of the form σ ~ (εN)^(-d) , d > 0. We find that the energy crossover between the two energy regimes decays as 1/N , which indicates that q-tori disappear in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, we focus on the times that such localization profiles are practically frozen and we find that these "stickiness times" can rapidly and accurately distinguish between a power-law and a stretched exponential dependence in 1/ε

Dynamics and Statistics of Weak Chaos in a 4–D Symplectic Map

The important phenomenon of “stickiness” of chaotic orbits in low dimensional dynamical systems has been investigated for several decades, in view of its applications to various areas of physics, such as classical and statistical mechanics, celestial mechanics and accelerator dynamics. Most of the work to date has focused on two-degree of freedom Hamiltonian models often represented by two-dimensional (2D) area preserving maps. In this paper, we extend earlier results using a 4–dimensional extension of the 2D MacMillan map, and show that a symplectic model of two coupled MacMillan maps also exhibits stickiness phenomena in limited regions of phase space. To this end, we employ probability distributions in the sense of the Central Limit Theorem to demonstrate that, as in the 2D case, sticky regions near the origin are also characterized by “weak” chaos and Tsallis entropy, in sharp contrast to the “strong” chaos that extends over much wider domains and is described by Boltzmann Gibbs statistics. Remarkably, similar stickiness phenomena have been observed in higher dimensional Hamiltonian systems around unstable simple periodic orbits at various values of the total energy of the system

The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam Problem and Its Underlying Integrable Dynamics

This paper is devoted to a numerical study of the familiar α+β FPU model. Precisely, we here discuss, revisit and combine together two main ideas on the subject: (i) In the system, at small specific energy ε=E/N, two well separated time-scales are present: in the former one a kind of metastable state is produced, while in the second much larger one, such an intermediate state evolves and reaches statistical equilibrium. (ii) FPU should be interpreted as a perturbed Toda model, rather than (as is typical) as a linear model perturbed by nonlinear terms. In the view we here present and support, the former time scale is the one in which FPU is essentially integrable, its dynamics being almost indistinguishable from the Toda dynamics: the Toda actions stay constant for FPU too (while the usual linear normal modes do not), the angles fill their almost invariant torus, and nothing else happens. The second time scale is instead the one in which the Toda actions significantly evolve, and statistical equilibrium is possible. We study both FPU-like initial states, in which only a few degrees of freedom are excited, and generic initial states extracted randomly from an (approximated) microcanonical distribution. The study is based on a close comparison between the behavior of FPU and Toda in various situations. The main technical novelty is the study of the correlation functions of the Toda constants of motion in the FPU dynamics; such a study allows us to provide a good definition of the equilibrium time τ, i.e. of the second time scale, for generic initial data. Our investigation shows that τ is stable in the thermodynamic limit, i.e. the limit of large N at fixed ε, and that by reducing ε (ideally, the temperature), τ approximately grows following a power law τ∼ε^(−a) , with α=5/2

Energy transmission in Hamiltonian systems of globally interacting particles with Klein-Gordon on-site potentials

We consider a family of 1-dimensional Hamiltonian systems consisting of a large number of particles with on-site potentials and global (long range) interactions. The particles are initially at rest at the equilibrium position, and are perturbed sinusoidally at one end using Dirichlet data, while at the other end we place an absorbing boundary to simulate a semi-infinite medium. Using such a lattice with quadratic particle interactions and Klein-Gordon type on-site potential, we use a parameter 0 ≤ α < ∞as a measure of the “length” of interactions, and show that there is a sharp threshold above which energy is transmitted in the form of large amplitude nonlinear modes, as long as driving frequencies Ω lie in the forbidden band-gap of the system. This process is called nonlinear supratransmission and is investigated here numerically to show that it occurs at higher amplitudes the longer the range of interactions, reaching a maximum at a value α = αmax . 1.5 that depends on Ω. Below this αmax supratransmission thresholds decrease sharply to values lower than the nearest neighbor α = ∞ limit. We give a plausible argument for this phenomenon and conjecture that similar results are present in related systems such as the sine-Gordon, the nonlinear Klein-Gordon and the double sine-Gordon type

Dynamics and statistics of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam β-model with different ranges of particle interactions

In the present work we study the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) β-model involving long-range interactions (LRI) in both the quadratic and quartic potentials, by introducing two independent exponents α_1 and α_2 respectively, which make the {forces decay} with distance r. Our results demonstrate that weak chaos, in the sense of decreasing Lyapunov exponents, and q-Gaussian probability density functions (pdfs) of sums of the momenta, occurs only when long-range interactions are included in the quartic part. More importantly, for 01, as N goes to infinity, suggesting that these pdfs persist in that limit. On the other hand, when long-range interactions are imposed only on the quadratic part, strong chaos and purely Gaussian pdfs are always obtained for the momenta. We have also focused on similar pdfs for the particle energies and have obtained (q_E)-exponentials (with q_E>1) when the quartic-term interactions are long-ranged, otherwise we get the standard Boltzmann-Gibbs weight, with q=1. The values of q_E coincide, within small discrepancies, with the values of q obtained by the momentum distributions