Changes in the adiabatic invariant and streamline chaos in confined incompressible Stokes flow

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Abstract
The steady incompressible flow in a unit sphere introduced by Bajer and Moffatt [J. Fluid Mech. 212, 337 (1990)] is discussed. The velocity field of this flow differs by a small perturbation from an integrable field whose streamlines are almost all closed. The unperturbed flow has two stationary saddle points (poles of the sphere) and a two-dimensional separatrix passing through them. The entire interior of the unit sphere becomes the domain of streamline chaos for an arbitrarily small perturbation. This phenomenon is explained by the nonconservation of a certain adiabatic invariant that undergoes a jump when a streamline crosses a small neighborhood of the separatrix of the unperturbed flow. An asymptotic formula is obtained for the jump in the adiabatic invariant. The accumulation of such jumps in the course of repeated crossings of the separatrix results in the complete breaking of adiabatic invariance and streamline chaos.