Strong variation of global-transport properties in chaotic ensembles

Abstract

Chaotic transport is studied for Hamiltonians H in which one coordinate, say q, is cyclic (i.e., it does not appear in H), leading to the conservation of the conjugate coordinate (“momentum” p). It is assumed that the dynamics depends nontrivially on the “parameter” p in H. As a consequence, one expects to observe a variation of the global-transport properties, both normal and anomalous, in a generic chaotic ensemble that exhibits all values of p. By considering the realistic model system of charged particles interacting with an electrostatic wave-packet in a uniform magnetic field, it is shown that this variation can be actually quite strong. This finding may have applications to “filtering” sub-ensembles with well-defined values of p.