SEMINAIRE MERCREDI 4 FEVRIER 2004 14 heures Salle Séminaire 5 Centre de Physique Théorique Marseille-Luminy Angelo Vulpiani Dip. di Fisica, Universita La Sapienza - Roma Title: Diffusive transport and self-consistent dynamics in coupled maps Abstract: The study of diffusion in Hamiltonian systems has been a problem of interest for a number of years. We explore the influence of self-consistency on the diffusion properties of systems described by coupled symplectic maps. Self-consistency, i.e. the back-influence of the transported quantity on the velocity field of the driving flow, despite of its critical importance, is usually overlooked in the description of realistic systems, for example in plasma physics. We propose a class of self-consistent models consisting of an ensemble of maps globally coupled through a mean field. Depending on the kind of coupling, two different general types of self-consistent maps are considered: maps coupled to the field only through the phase, and fully coupled maps, i.e.through the phase and the amplitude of the external field.