[Physics] Why are we sure that integrals of motion don’t exist in a chaotic system

chaos theoryclassical-mechanicscomplex systemsintegrable-systemsintegrals-of-motion

The stadium billiard is known to be a chaotic system. This means that the only integral of motion (quantity which is conserved along any trajectory of motion) is the energy $E=(p_x^2+p_y^2)/2m$.

Why are we sure that no other, independent on $E$, integrals of motion exist in this system? One can assume existence of some, perhaps infinitely complicated, function $I(x,y,p_x,p_y)$, which is conserved and independent on $p_x^2+p_y^2$. Why is this assumption wrong?

In other words: the simplest prototypical examples of integrable billiards (rectangular, circular, elliptical) have some obvious symmetries allowing us to find two independent integrals of motion. What if, in some other billiard, such integrals do also exist, but are not so obvious and have no simple analytical form? How can we distinguish two situations:

  1. there exist two independent integrals of motion, so the system is integrable, but their form is very complicated,

  2. the only integral of motion is $E$ and other independent integrals are absent?

I'm not a specialist in dynamical systems and related complicated mathematics, so any simple explanations will be appreciated. I've found the related questions Idea of integrable systems and Non-integrability of the 2D double pendulum but didn't get any simple answer.

Best Answer

I think one must distinguish between chaotic "Hamiltonian" systems and chaotic dissipative systems. In the latter, the phase space volume is not conserved, so it is much more difficult to find "integrals of motion" because Liouville's theorem is broken. Remember, a quantity "A" is an integral of motion if

$\frac{dA}{dt} = \frac{\partial A}{\partial t} + \{A,H\} = 0$, where $H$ is the Hamiltonian. For dissipative chaotic systems, you can't even write down $H$, so it is difficult to see how one could generally find integrals/constants of motion of the system.

However, there is an important class of systems that show up in cosmology for example where you have Hamiltonian "chaos", where essentially the trajectories of the system exhibit all of the properties of chaos: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, diverging trajectories over time, but, the system still has attractors: a famous example is the dynamics of a closed anisotropic universe / Bianchi IX, in shameless self-promotion here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0389.pdf (in particular, see Page 27) This has of course led to wide debates for years in the cosmology community of whether this is "Really" chaos, since, in principle, the trajectories are predictable, but, I hope this answers your question.

Further, with respect to your Billiards problem / the famous Hadamard billiards, as you can see it is the same as the diagram on Page 27. Therefore, the billiard problem is also an example of Hamiltonian / deterministic / non-dissipative chaos. The phase space has an asymptotic attractor. This hopefully demonstrates that integrals of motion such as the one you found above ($E$ is the total energy of the system, and in this case, is the Hamiltonian, $H$) are only really possible if one can write down a Hamiltonian by Liouville's theorem.

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