Abstract

We investigate localization phenomena and stability properties of quasiperiodic oscillations in degree of freedom Hamiltonian systems and coupled symplectic maps. In particular, we study an example of a parametrically driven Hamiltonian lattice with only quartic coupling terms and a system of coupled standard maps. We explore their dynamics using the Generalized Alignment Index (GALI), which constitutes a recently developed numerical method for detecting chaotic orbits in many dimensions, estimating the dimensionality of quasiperiodic tori and predicting slow diffusion in a way that is faster and more reliable than many other approaches known to date.