Hierarchical structure in sharply divided phase space for the piecewise linear map.

We have studied a two-dimensional piecewise linear map to examine how the hierarchical structure of stable regions affects the slow dynamics in Hamiltonian systems. In the phase space there are infinitely many stable regions, each of which is polygonal-shaped, and the rest is occupied by chaotic orbits. By using symbolic representation of stable regions, a procedure to compute the edges of the polygons is presented. The stable regions are hierarchically distributed in phase space and the edges of the stable regions show the marginal instability. The cumulative distribution of the recurrence time obeys a power law as ∼t^{-2}, the same as the one for the system with phase space, which is composed of a single stable region and chaotic components. By studying the symbol sequence of recurrence trajectories, we show that the hierarchical structure of stable regions has no significant effect on the power-law exponent and that only the marginal instability on the boundary of stable regions is responsible for determining the exponent. We also discuss the relevance of the hierarchical structure to those in more generic chaotic systems.