A family of stadium-like billiards with parabolic boundaries under scaling analysis

Abstract

Some chaotic properties of a family of stadium-like billiards with parabolic focusing components, which is described by a two-dimensional nonlinear area-preserving map, are studied. Critical values of billiard geometric parameters corresponding to a sudden change of the maximal Lyapunov exponent are found. It is shown that the maximal Lyapunov exponent obtained for chaotic orbits of this family is scaling invariant with respect to the control parameters describing the geometry of the billiard. We also show that this behavior is observed for a generic one-parameter family of mapping with the nonlinearity given by a tangent function.