title: Stickiness in mushroom billiards.
abstract: We investigate the dynamical properties of chaotic trajectories in mushroom billiards. These billiards present a well-defined simple border between a single regular region and a single chaotic component. We find that the stickiness of chaotic trajectories near the border of the regular region occurs through an infinite number of marginally unstable periodic orbits. These orbits have zero measure, thus not affecting the ergodicity of the chaotic region. Notwithstanding, they govern the main dynamical properties of the system. In particular, we show that the marginally unstable periodic orbits explain the periodicity and the power-law behavior with exponent gamma=2 observed in the distribution of recurrence times.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany. edugalt@mpipks-dresden.mpg.de
authors.forename: Eduardo G
authors.initials: EG
authors.lastname: Altmann
authors.forename: Adilson E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Motter
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kantz
mesh_terms: D000268:Adhesiveness; D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes