A unified treatment of resonant problems with special emphasis on the recently discovered phenomenon of homoclinic jumping. After a survey of the necessary background, the book develops a general finite dimensional theory of homoclinic jumping, illustrating it with examples. The main mechanism of chaos near resonances is discussed in both the dissipative and the Hamiltonian context, incorporating previously unpublished new results on universal homoclinic bifurcations near resonances, as well as on multi-pulse Silnikov manifolds. The results are applied to a variety of different problems, which include applications from beam oscillations, surface wave dynamics, nonlinear optics, atmospheric science and fluid mechanics.

The conference 'Chaos in Astronomy' was held in Athens on 17-20 Sept. 2007. This book contains edited refereed contributions. It offers an overview to students and newcomers entering various fields of dynamical astronomy.

This is the first monograph dedicated entirely to problems of stability and chaotic behaviour in planetary systems and its subsystems. The author explores the three rapidly developing interplaying fields of resonant and chaotic dynamics of Hamiltonian systems, the dynamics of Solar system bodies, and the dynamics of exoplanetary systems. The necessary concepts, methods and tools used to study dynamical chaos (such as symplectic maps, Lyapunov exponents and timescales, chaotic diffusion rates, stability diagrams and charts) are described and then used to show in detail how the observed dynamical architectures arise in the Solar system (and its subsystems) and in exoplanetary systems. The book concentrates, in particular, on chaotic diffusion and clearing effects. The potential readership of this book includes scientists and students working in astrophysics, planetary science, celestial mechanics, and nonlinear dynamics.

This book is one of the first to provide a general overview of order and chaos in dynamical astronomy. The progress of the theory of chaos has a profound impact on galactic dynamics. It has even invaded celestial mechanics, since chaos was found in the solar system which in the past was considered as a prototype of order. The book provides a unifying approach to these topics from an author who has spent more than 50 years of research in the field. The first part treats order and chaos in general. The other two parts deal with order and chaos in galaxies and with other applications in dynamical astronomy, ranging from celestial mechanics to general relativity and cosmology.

This symposium was devoted to a new celestial mechanics whose aim has become the study of such `objects' as the planetary system, planetary rings, the asteroidal belt, meteor swarms, satellite systems, comet families, the zodiacal cloud, the preplanetary nebula, etc. When the three-body problem is considered instead of individual orbits we are, now, looking for the topology of extended regions of its phase space. This Symposium was one step in the effort to close the ties between two scientific families: the observationally-oriented scientists and the theoretically-oriented scientists.

This unique book presents a different point of view on the fundamental theory of global transversality, resonance and chaotic dynamics in n -dimensional nonlinear dynamic systems. The methodology and techniques presented in this book are applicable to nonlinear dynamical systems in general. This book provides useful tools for analytical and numerical predictions of chaos in nonlinear Hamiltonian and dissipative systems. All theoretical results are strictly proved. However, the ideas presented in this book are less formal and rigorous in an informal and lively manner. The author hopes the initial ideas may give some inspirations in the field of nonlinear dynamics. With physical concepts, the author also used the simple, mathematical language to write this book. Therefore, this book is very readable, which can be either a textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate students or a reference book for researches in nonlinear dynamics. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Introduction (1,196 KB). Contents: Differential Geometry of Flows; Global Transversality in Continuous Dynamical Systems; Chaotic Layer Dynamics; Two-Dimensional Stochastic Layers; Stochasticity in Resonant Separatrix Layers; Nonlinear Dynamics on an Equi-energy Surface; Stability and Grazing in Dissipative Systems; Global Dynamics in Two-Dimensional Dynamical Systems; Flow Switchability in Discontinuous Dynamical Systems. Readership: Mathematicians, physicists, researchers and engineers in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering as well as university professors and students.

Since the early developments of 'nonlinear science', plasma physics played a major role in its evolution: solitons, hamiltonian chaos, distinction between absolute and convective instabilities, and dynamics of coherent structures in turbulence. Understanding transport in plasmas is important for fusion devices but also for fundamental astrophysics, for fluid mechanics, for theoretical chemistry and engineering, and plasma processing in engineering.This second workshop gathered experts in plasma physics, nonlinear phenomena and mathematics. It aimed at enabling theoreticians, numericians and experimentalists in plasma turbulence to relate electromagnetic fluctuations, modes of self-organisation and transport processes. It may lead to developing new diagnostics and new methods for signal processing.

The reader will find in this volume the Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute held in Cortina d' Ampezzo, Italy, between July 25 and August 6, 1993, under the title From Newton to Chaos: Modem Techniques for Understanding and Coping With Chaos inN-Body Dynamical Systems. This institute was the latest in a series of meetings held every three years from 1972 to 1990 in dynamical astronomy, theoretical mechanics and celestial mechanics. The proceedings from these institutes have been well-received in the international community of research workers in these disciplines. The present institute was well attended with 15 series of lectures being given by invited speakers: in addition some 40 presentations were made by the other participants. The majority of these contributions are included in these proceedings. The all-pervading influence of chaos in dynamical systems (of even a few variables) has now been universally recognised by researchers, a recognition forced on us by our ability, using powerful computer hardware and software, to tackle dynamical problems that until twenty-five years ago were intractable. Doubtless it was felt by many that these new techniques provided a break-through in celestial mechanics and its related disciplines. And so they were.

From the 18th to the 30th August 2003 , a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) was held in Cargèse, Corsica, France. Cargèse is a nice small village situated by the mediterranean sea and the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques de Cargese provides ? a traditional place to organize Theoretical Physics Summer Schools and Workshops * in a closed and well equiped place. The ASI was an International Summer School on "Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Classical and Quantum Systems". The main goal of the school was to develop the mutual interaction between Physics and Mathematics concerning statistical properties of classical and quantum dynamical systems. Various experimental and numerical observations have shown new phenomena of chaotic and anomalous transport, fractal structures, chaos in physics accelerators and in cooled atoms inside atom-optics billiards, space-time chaos, fluctuations far from equilibrium, quantum decoherence etc. New theoretical methods have been developed in order to modelize and to understand these phenomena (volume preserving and ergodic dynamical systems, non-equilibrium statistical dynamics, fractional kinetics, coupled maps, space-time entropy, quantum dissipative processes etc). The school gathered a team of specialists from several horizons lecturing and discussing on the achievements, perspectives and open problems (both fundamental and applied).

Nonlinear dynamical systems play an important role in a number of disciplines. The physical, biological, economic and even sociological worlds are comprised of com plex nonlinear systems that cannot be broken down into the behavior of their con stituents and then reassembled to form the whole. The lack of a superposition principle in such systems has challenged researchers to use a variety of analytic and numerical methods in attempts to understand the interesting nonlinear interactions that occur in the World around us. General relativity is a nonlinear dynamical theory par excellence. Only recently has the nonlinear evolution of the gravitational field described by the theory been tackled through the use of methods used in other disciplines to study the importance of time dependent nonlinearities. The complexity of the equations of general relativity has been (and still remains) a major hurdle in the formulation of concrete mathematical concepts. In the past the imposition of a high degree of symmetry has allowed the construction of exact solutions to the Einstein equations. However, most of those solutions are nonphysical and of those that do have a physical significance, many are often highly idealized or time independent.