Chaotic scattering, transport, and fractals in a simple hydrodynamic flow

Abstract

Advection of passive tracers in an unsteady hydrodynamic flow consisting of a background stream and a vortex is analyzed as an example of chaotic particle scattering and transport. A numerical analysis reveals a nonattracting chaotic invariant set Λ that determines the scattering and trapping of particles from the incoming flow. The set has a hyperbolic component consisting of unstable periodic and aperiodic orbits and a nonhyperbolic component represented by marginally unstable orbits in the particle-trapping regions in the neighborhoods of the boundaries of outer invariant tori. The geometry and topology of chaotic scattering are examined. It is shown that both the trapping time for particles in the mixing region and the number of times their trajectories wind around the vortex have hierarchical fractal structure as functions of the initial particle coordinates. The hierarchy is found to have certain properties due to an infinite number of intersections of the stable manifold in Λ with a material line consisting of particles from the incoming flow. Scattering functions are singular on a Cantor set of initial conditions, and this property must manifest itself by strong fluctuations of quantities measured in experiments.