Biomedical subjects

V Constantoudis

Publications and source records attributed to V Constantoudis.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Hyperacceleration in a stochastic Fermi-Ulam model.

Fermi acceleration in a Fermi-Ulam model, consisting of an ensemble of particles bouncing between two, infinitely heavy, stochastically oscillating hard walls, is investigated. It is shown that the widely used approximation, neglecting the displacement of the walls (static wall approximation), leads to a systematic underestimation of particle acceleration. An improved approximative map is introduced, which takes into account the effect of the wall displacement, and in addition allows the analytical estimation of the long term behavior of the particle mean velocity as well as the corresponding probability distribution, in complete agreement with the numerical results of the exact dynamics. This effect accounting for the increased particle acceleration--Fermi hyperacceleration--is also present in higher-dimensional systems, such as the driven Lorentz gas.

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PubMed2006

Lyapunov instability versus relaxation time in two coupled oscillators.

We consider the relation between relaxation time and the largest Lyapunov exponent in a system of two coupled oscillators, one of them being harmonic. It has been found that in a rather broad region of parameter space, contrary to the common expectation, both Lyapunov exponent and relaxation time increase as a function of the total energy. This effect is attributed to the fact that above a critical value of the total energy, although the Lyapunov exponent increases, Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser tori appear and the chaotic fraction of phase space decreases. We examine the required conditions and demonstrate the key role of the dispersion relation for this behavior to occur. This study is useful, among other things, in the understanding of the damping of nuclear giant resonances.

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PubMed2004

Scattering off two oscillating disks: dilute chaos.

We investigate the role of the unstable periodic orbits and their manifolds in the dynamics of a time-dependent two-dimensional scattering system. As a prototype we use two oscillating disks on the plane with the oscillation axes forming an angle theta. The phase space of the system is five dimensional and it possesses a variety of families of unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) with intersecting manifolds. We perform numerical experiments to probe the structure of distinct scattering functions, in one and two dimensions, near the location of the UPOs. We find that the corresponding manifolds occur only in a very particular and localized way in the high-dimensional phase space. As a consequence the underlying fractal structure is ubiquitous only in higher-dimensional, e.g., two-dimensional, scattering functions. Both two-dimensional and one-dimensional scattering functions are dominated by seemingly infinite sequences of discontinuities characterized by small values of the magnitude of the projectile's outgoing velocity. These peaks accumulate toward the phase-space locations of the UPOs, with a rate which monotonically depends on the corresponding instability exponent. They represent the intersections of the set of the initial conditions with invariant sets of larger dimensionality embedded in the phase space of the system, which are not directly related with the UPOs. We adopt the term "dilute chaos" to characterize these phenomenological aspects of the scattering dynamics.

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PubMed2001

Nonhyperbolic escape and changes in phase-space stability structures in laser-induced multiphoton dissociation of a diatomic molecule.

The dependence of photodissociation of a diatomic molecule (vibrating according to the Morse potential) on the frequency of the laser field that induces it, is studied in the context of classical nonlinear dynamics. First, it is observed that as the laser frequency increases towards the harmonic frequency of the potential, a transition from stabilization due to Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser tori to stabilization caused by the resonance stability island occurs. Then, considering the photodissociation as a nonhyperbolic half-scattering process, we investigate the influence of these changes in the phase space stability structures on dissociation dynamics via the examination of the fractal set of singularities appearing in the time-delay function of the initial state. It is found that the effective fractal dimension of this set (a finite-scale approximation of the exact dimension which is always equal to 1) and the percentage of its singularities provide a link between these changes and the dissociation rate.

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PubMed2001

Nonperiodic delay mechanism and fractallike behavior in classical time-dependent scattering.

We study the occurrence of delay mechanisms other than periodic orbits in scattering systems with time-dependent potentials. By using as model system two harmonically oscillating disks on a plane, we have found the existence of a mechanism not related to the periodic orbits of the system, that delays trajectories in the scattering region. This mechanism creates a fractallike structure in the scattering functions and can possibly occur in several time-dependent scattering systems.

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