Abstract
The onset of chaotic behavior in a class of classical scattering problems is shown to occur in two possible ways. One is abrupt and is related to a change in the topology of the energy surface. The other arises as a result of a complex sequence of saddle-node and period doubling bifurcations. The abrupt bifurcation represents a new generic route to chaos and yields a characteristic scaling of the frac- tal dimension associated with the scattering function as [ln(-E, for particle energies E near the critical value at which the scattering becomes chaotic.
- Received 30 May 1989
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.63.919
©1989 American Physical Society