Width of the chaotic layer: maxima due to marginal resonances

Abstract: Modern theoretical methods for estimating the width of the chaotic layer in presence of prominent marginal resonances are considered in the perturbed pendulum model of nonlinear resonance. The fields of applicability of these methods are explicitly and precisely formulated. The comparative accuracy is investigated in massive and long-run numerical experiments. It is shown that the methods are naturally subdivided in classes applicable for adiabatic and non-adiabatic cases of perturbation. It is explicitly shown that the pendulum approximation of marginal resonance works good in the non-adiabatic case. In this case, the role of marginal resonances in determining the total layer width is demonstrated to diminish with increasing the main parameter \lambda (equal to the ratio of the perturbation frequency to the frequency of small-amplitude phase oscillations on the resonance). Solely the "bending effect" is important in determining the total amplitude of the energy deviations of the near-separatrix motion at \lambda > 7. In the adiabatic case, it is demonstrated that the geometrical form of the separatrix cell can be described analytically quite easily by means of using a specific representation of the separatrix map. It is shown that the non-adiabatic (and, to some extent, intermediary) case is most actual, in comparison with the adiabatic one, for the physical or technical applications that concern the energy jumps in the near-separatrix chaotic motion.