A Continuous Family of Non-Monotonic Toral Mixing Maps

Abstract: We establish the mixing property for a family of Lebesgue measure preserving toral maps composed of two piecewise linear shears, the first of which is non-monotonic. The maps serve as a basic model for the `stretching and folding' action in laminar fluid mixing, in particular flows where boundary conditions give rise to non-monotonic flow profiles. The family can be viewed as the parameter space between two well known systems, Arnold's Cat Map and a map due to Cerbelli and Giona, both of which possess finite Markov partitions and straightforward to prove mixing properties. However, no such finite Markov partitions appear to exist for the present family, so establishing mixing properties requires a different approach. In particular we follow a scheme of Katok and Strelcyn, proving strong mixing properties with respect to the Lebesgue measure on two open parameter spaces. Finally we comment on the challenges in extending these mixing windows and the potential for using the same approach to prove mixing properties in similar systems.