Topological aspects of chaotic scattering in higher dimensions.

We investigate the topological properties of the chaotic invariant set associated with the dynamics of scattering systems with three or more degrees of freedom. We show that the separation of one degree of freedom from the rest in the asymptotic regime, a common property in a large class of scattering models, defines a gate which is a dynamical object with phase space separating invariant manifolds. The manifolds form an invariant set causing singularities in the scattering process. The codimension one property of the manifolds ensures that the fractal structure of the invariant set can be studied by scattering functions defined over simple one-dimensional families of initial conditions as usually done in two-degree-of-freedom scattering problems. It is found that the fractal dimension of the invariant set is not due to the gates but to interior hyperbolic periodic orbits.