Survey on the role of accelerator modes for anomalous diffusion: the case of the standard map

We perform an extensive and detailed analysis of the generalized diffusion processes in deterministic area preserving maps with noncompact phase space, exemplified by the standard map, with the special emphasis on understanding the anomalous diffusion arising due to the accelerator modes. The accelerator modes and their immediate neighborhood undergo ballistic transport in phase space, and also the greater vicinity of them is still much affected ("dragged") by them, giving rise to the non-Gaussian (accelerated) diffusion. The systematic approach rests upon the following applications: the GALI method to detect the regular and chaotic regions and thus to describe in detail the structure of the phase space, the description of the momentum distribution in terms of the Lévy stable distributions, and the numerical calculation of the diffusion exponent and of the corresponding diffusion constant. We use this approach to analyze in detail and systematically the standard map at all values of the kick parameter K, up to K = 70. All complex features of the anomalous diffusion are well understood in terms of the role of the accelerator modes, mainly of period 1 at large K ≥ 2π, but also of higher periods (2,3,4,...) at smaller values of K ≤ 2π.