Non-uniform ergodic properties of Hamiltonian flows with impacts

The ergodic properties of two uncoupled oscillators, one horizontal and one vertical, residing in a class of non-rectangular star-shaped polygons with only vertical and horizontal boundaries and impacting elastically from its boundaries are studied. We prove that the iso-energy level sets topology changes non-trivially; the flow on level sets is always conjugated to a translation flow on a translation surface, yet, for some segments of partial energies the genus of the surface is strictly greater than $1$ . When at least one of the oscillators is unharmonic, or when both are harmonic and non-resonant, we prove that for almost all partial energies, including the impacting ones, the flow on level sets is uniquely ergodic. When both oscillators are harmonic and resonant, we prove that there exist intervals of partial energies on which periodic ribbons and additional ergodic components coexist. We prove that for almost all partial energies in such segments the motion is uniquely ergodic on the part of the level set that is not occupied by the periodic ribbons. This implies that ergodic averages project to piecewise smooth weighted averages in the configuration space.

Refinements of topological invariants of flows

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>We construct topological invariants, called abstract weak orbit spaces, of flows and homeomorphisms on topological spaces. In particular, the abstract weak orbit spaces of flows on topological spaces are refinements of Morse graphs of flows on compact metric spaces, Reeb graphs of Hamiltonian flows with finitely many singular points on surfaces, and the CW decompositions which consist of the unstable manifolds of singular points for Morse flows on closed manifolds. Though the CW decomposition of a Morse flow is finite, the intersection of the unstable manifold and the stable manifold of closed orbits need not consist of finitely many connected components. Therefore we study the finiteness. Moreover, we consider when the time-one map reconstructs the topology of the original flow. We show that the orbit space of a Hamiltonian flow with finitely many singular points on a compact surface is homeomorphic to the abstract weak orbit space of the time-one map by taking an arbitrarily small reparametrization and that the abstract weak orbit spaces of a Morse flow on a compact manifold and the time-one map are homeomorphic. In addition, we state examples whose Morse graphs are singletons but whose abstract weak orbit spaces are not singletons.</p>

Orbital dynamics on invariant sets of contact Hamiltonian systems

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, we shall give new insights on dynamics of contact Hamiltonian flows, which are gaining importance in several branches of physics as they model a dissipative behaviour. We divide the contact phase space into three parts, which are corresponding to three differential invariant sets <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ \Omega_\pm, \Omega_0 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. On the invariant sets <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$ \Omega_\pm $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, under some geometric conditions, the contact Hamiltonian system is equivalent to a Hamiltonian system via the Hölder transformation. The invariant set <inline-formula><tex-math id="M3">\begin{document}$ \Omega_0 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> may be composed of several equilibrium points and heteroclinic orbits connecting them, on which contact Hamiltonian system is conservative. Moreover, we have shown that, under general conditions, the zero energy level domain is a domain of attraction. In some cases, such a domain of attraction does not have nontrivial periodic orbits. Some interesting examples are presented.</p>

Singularity of the Spectrum for Smooth Area-Preserving Flows in Genus Two and Translation Surfaces Well Approximated by Cylinders

We consider smooth flows preserving a smooth invariant measure, or, equivalently, locally Hamiltonian flows on compact orientable surfaces and show that, when the genus of the surface is two, almost every such locally Hamiltonian flow with two non-degenerate isomorphic saddles has singular spectrum. More in general, singularity of the spectrum holds for special flows over a full measure set of interval exchange transformations with a hyperelliptic permutation (of any number of exchanged intervals), under a roof with symmetric logarithmic singularities. The result is proved using a criterion for singularity based on tightness of Birkhoff sums with exponential tails decay. A key ingredient in the proof, which is of independent interest, is a result on translation surfaces well approximated by single cylinders. We show that for almost every translation surface in any connected component of any stratum there exists a full measure set of directions which can be well approximated by a single cylinder of area arbitrarily close to one. The result, in the special case of the stratum $$\mathcal {H}(1,1)$$ H ( 1 , 1 ) , yields rigidity sets needed for the singularity result.

Slow chaos in surface flows

Flows on surfaces describe many systems of physical origin and are one of the most fundamental examples of dynamical systems, studied since Poincará. In the last decade, there have been a lot of advances in our understanding of the chaotic properties of smooth area-preserving flows (a class which include locally Hamiltonian flows), thanks to the connection to Teichmueller dynamics and, very recently, to the influence of the work of Marina Ratner in homogeneous dynamics. We motivate and survey some of the recent breakthroughs on their mixing and spectral properties and the mechanisms, such as shearing, on which they are based, which exploit analytic, arithmetic and geometric techniques.

Complete transition diagrams of generic Hamiltonian flows with a few heteroclinic orbits

We study the transition graph of generic Hamiltonian surface flows, whose vertices are the topological equivalence classes of generic Hamiltonian surface flows and whose edges are the generic transitions. Using the transition graph, we can describe time evaluations of generic Hamiltonian surface flows (e.g., fluid phenomena) as walks on the graph. We propose a method for constructing the complete transition graph of all generic Hamiltonian flows. In fact, we construct two complete transition graphs of Hamiltonian surface flows having three and four genus elements. Moreover, we demonstrate that a lower bound on the transition distance between two Hamiltonian surface flows with any number of genus elements can be calculated by solving an integer programming problem using vector representations of Hamiltonian surface flows.

Symplectic Banach–Mazur distances between subsets of ℂn

Following proposals of Ostrover and Polterovich, we introduce and study “coarse” and “fine” versions of a symplectic Banach–Mazur distance on certain open subsets of [Formula: see text] and other open Liouville domains. The coarse version declares two such domains to be close to each other if each domain admits a Liouville embedding into a slight dilate of the other; the fine version, which is similar to the distance on subsets of cotangent bundles of surfaces recently studied by Stojisavljević and Zhang, imposes an additional requirement on the images of these embeddings that is motivated by the definition of the classical Banach–Mazur distance on convex bodies. Our first main result is that the coarse and fine distances are quite different from each other, in that there are sequences that converge coarsely to an ellipsoid but diverge to infinity with respect to the fine distance. Our other main result is that, with respect to the fine distance, the space of star-shaped domains in [Formula: see text] admits quasi-isometric embeddings of [Formula: see text] for every finite dimension [Formula: see text]. Our constructions are obtained from a general method of constructing [Formula: see text]-dimensional Liouville domains whose boundaries have Reeb dynamics determined by certain autonomous Hamiltonian flows on a given [Formula: see text]-dimensional Liouville domain. The bounds underlying our main results are proven using filtered equivariant symplectic homology via methods from [J. Gutt and M. Usher, Symplectically knotted codimension-zero embeddings between domains in [Formula: see text], Duke Math. J. 168 (2019) 2299–2363].