Turning-Point Count Discrepancy as a Diagnostic of Relativistic Orbital Chaos

Abstract

We propose the turning-point count-discrepancy indicator (TPCD) for diagnosing orbital chaos from a single trajectory in relativistic Hamiltonian systems with two oscillatory degrees of freedom. TPCD measures the largest cumulative departure of one turning-event count from its mean rate per reference cycle, requiring neither a neighboring orbit nor a phase-space partition and applying to both massive particles and photons. We establish its long-time behavior under explicit event--phase assumptions. Rigid phases with an exact event--phase correspondence obey a strict discrepancy bound of unity, and linearizable regular tori with bounded degree-one phase deformations obey a finite, orbit-dependent bound; both imply that the normalized indicator decays to zero as the record grows. A diffusive fluctuation mechanism instead yields a Brownian-bridge scaling and a finite statistical scale. Integrable Kerr motion validates the construction, recovering prescribed frequency ratios from event counts to within $2.6\times10^{-5}$ for six targets, including an irrational ratio. In charged-particle scans around a Kerr black hole in an external test magnetic field, TPCD and the fast Lyapunov indicator agree for all 80 sampled trajectories. In the Schwarzschild--Melvin photon model, a trajectory with elevated finite-time TPCD but low fast-Lyapunov values is identified as regular once its indicator trends downward over an extended integration, showing that finite-time values must be read together with their long-time trend.