Coarse-grained properties of the chaotic trajectories in the stadium (Q923454)

In classical dynamics, ergodic properties are usually defined in the limit of very long times and infinitely fine resolution in phase space, while in practice, the physical properties are measured at finite times and with finite resolutions. So, in order to compare the theoretical and experimental results, it is of great importance to determine how the coarse-graining induced by the finite resolution modifies the asymptotic properties. The authors report numerical results of the investigation of coarse- grained properties of the chaotic trajectories of a ball bouncing on the wall of a peculiar billiard, the Bunimovich stadium [\textit{L. A. Bunimovich}, Funct. Anal. Appl. 8(1974), 254-255 (1975); translation from Funkts. Anal. Prilozh. 8, No.3, 73-74 (1974; Zbl 0303.28018)]), made of two half-circles of unit radius and separated by a rectilinear portion of length \(\epsilon\). As it is known, while in the integrable case \((\epsilon =0)\) the trajectories are regular, in the non-integrable stadium (\(\epsilon\neq 0)\), almost all trajectories are chaotic in the strongest sense of the term, namely, ergodic, mixing and k-complex. A quantitative measure of this chaos is given by the Kolmogorov entropy that describes the average exponential rate with which neighboring trajectories diverge. As coarse-grained analogues of exactly closed orbits in configuration space, the authors investigate properties of ``recurrent'' orbits in configuration space, starting inside a small disk of radius r and returning to it for the first time after a distance \({\mathcal L}\). The dependence of the orbit length \({\mathcal L}\) on the launching angle as well as the number of orbits \({\mathcal N}({\mathcal L})\) are explored. The most important result is the exponential dependence of \({\mathcal N}({\mathcal L})\) over a large range of \({\mathcal L}\) and r values with a typical decay length proportional to the total surface of the billiard. This property suggests that the nature of the chaos in the stadium is equivalent to a sequence of random steps, not only in the phase space but also in the configuration space. As the authors mention, the properties of coarse-grained trajectories is interesting for (1) connecting the dynamical properties of billiards (internal problem) to the (external) problem of chaotic scattering, (2) for defining tests of the general statistical laws of geometrical acoustics in auditoriums (room acoustics) and (3) for exploring one aspect of the correspondence between classical and quantum chaos, namely, the introduction of a finite de Broglie wavelength.