G. S. Ezra and S. Wiggins, Sampling Phase Space Dividing Surfaces Constructed from Normally Hyperbolic Invariant Manifolds (NHIMs), J. Phys. Chem. A., 122(42), 8354–8362 (2018).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpca.8b07205
In this paper, we further investigate the construction of a phase space dividing surface (DS) from a normally hyperbolic invariant manifold (NHIM) and the sampling procedure for the resulting dividing surface described in earlier work (Wiggins, S.; J. Chem. Phys. 2016, 144, 054107). Our discussion centers on the relationship between geometrical structures and dynamics for 2 and 3 degree of freedom (DoF) systems, specifically, the construction of a DS from a NHIM. We show that if the equation for the NHIM and associated DS is known (e.g., as obtained from Poincaré–Birkhoff normal form theory), then the numerical procedure described in Wiggins et al. ( J. Chem. Phys. 2016, 144, 054107) gives the same result as a sampling method based upon the explicit form of the NHIM. After describing the sampling procedure in a general context, it is applied to a quadratic Hamiltonian normal form near an index-one saddle where explicit formulas exist for both the NHIM and the DS. It is shown for both 2 and 3 DoF systems that a version of the general sampling procedure provides points on the analytically defined DS with the correct microcanonical density on the constant-energy DS. Excellent agreement is obtained between analytical and numerical averages of quadratic energy terms over the DS for a range of energies.
