Identifying localized and spreading chaos in nonlinear disordered lattices by the Generalized Alignment Index (GALI) method

TL;DR

This study uses the GALI chaos detection method to analyze the transition from chaotic to regular behavior in a nonlinear disordered lattice, revealing how chaos diminishes with decreasing energy and differs between localized and spreading regimes.

Contribution

It applies the GALI method to a disordered Klein-Gordon lattice, providing new insights into chaos localization, spreading, and the energy dependence of chaotic dynamics.

Findings

Chaos probability decreases as energy approaches the linear limit.

Localized chaos dominates at lower energies.

Single mode excitations exhibit more chaos at higher energies.

Abstract

Implementing the Generalized Alignment Index (GALI) method of chaos detection we investigate the dynamical behavior of the nonlinear disordered Klein-Gordon lattice chain in one spatial dimension. By performing extensive numerical simulations of single site and single mode initial excitations, for several disordered realizations and different disorder strengths, we determine the probability to observe chaotic behavior as the system is approaching its linear limit, i.e. when its total energy, which plays the role of the system's nonlinearity strength, decreases. We find that the percentage of chaotic cases diminishes as the energy decreases leading to exclusively regular motion on multidimensional tori. We also discriminate between localized and spreading chaos, with the former dominating the dynamics for lower energy values. In addition, our results show that single mode excitations lead to more chaotic behaviors for larger energies compared to single site excitations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the GALI method can be efficiently used to determine a characteristic chaoticity time scale for the system when strong enough nonlinearites lead to energy delocalization in both the so-called `weak' and `strong chaos' spreading regimes.