Sticky orbits of a kicked harmonic oscillator

We study a Hamiltonian dynamical system consisting of a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator kicked impulsively in 4:1 resonance with its natural frequency, with the amplitude of the kick proportional to a sawtooth function of position. For special values of the coupling parameter, the dynamical map W relating the phase-space coordinates just prior to each kick acts locally as a piecewise affine map K on a square with rational rotation number p/q. For λ = 2cos2πp/q a quadratic irrational, a recursive return-map structure allows us to completely characterize the orbits of the map K. The aperiodic orbits of this system are sticky in the sense that they spend all of their time wandering pseudo-chaotically (with strictly zero Lyapunov exponent) in the vicinity of self-similar archipelagos of periodic islands. The same recursive structure used locally for K gives us the asymptotic scaling features of long orbits of W on the infinite plane. For some coupling parameters the orbits remain bounded, but for others the distance from the origin increases as a logarithm or power of the time. In the latter case, we find examples of sub-diffusive, diffusive, super-diffusive, and ballistic power-law behavior