Scaling Laws in Dynamical Systems

This book discusses many of the common scaling properties observed in some nonlinear dynamical systems mostly described by mappings. The unpredictability of the time evolution of two nearby initial conditions in the phase space together with the exponential divergence from each other as time goes by lead to the concept of chaos. Some of the observables in nonlinear systems exhibit characteristics of scaling invariance being then described via scaling laws.

From the variation of control parameters, physical observables in the phase space may be characterized by using power laws that many times yield into universal behavior. The application of such a formalism has been well accepted in the scientific community of nonlinear dynamics. Therefore I had in mind when writing this book was to bring together few of the research results in nonlinear systems using scaling formalism that could treated either in under-graduation as well as in the post graduation in the several exact programs but no earlier requirements were needed from the students unless the basic physics and mathematics. At the same time, the book must be original enough to contribute to the existing literature but with no excessive superposition of the topics already dealt with in other text books. The majority of the Chapters present a list of exercises. Some of them are analytic and others are numeric with few presenting some degree of computational complexity.

About the Author: Edson Denis Leonel is Professor of Physics at São Paulo State University, Rio Claro, Brazil. He has been dealing with scaling investigation since his PhD in 2003 where the first scaling investigation in chaotic sea for the Fermi-Ulam model was studied. His research group developed different approaches and formalisms to investigate and characterise the several scaling properties in a diversity types of systems ranging from one-dimensional mappings, passing to ordinary differential equations, cellular automata, in meme propagations and also in the time dependent billiards. There are different types of transition we considered and discussed in these scaling investigations: (I) transition from integrability to non-integrability; (ii) transition from limited to unlimited diffusion and; (iii) production and suppression of Fermi acceleration. The latter approach involves the analytical solution of the diffusion equation. His group and he published more than 150 scientific papers in respected international journals including three papers in Physical Review Letters. He is author of two books in Portuguese language, one dealing with statistical mechanics (2015) and the other one dealing with nonlinear dynamics (2019), both edited by Blucher.