Distinguishing quasiperiodic dynamics from chaos in short-time series.

We propose a procedure to distinguish quasiperiodic from chaotic orbits in short-time series, which is based on the recurrence properties in phase space. The histogram of the return times in a recurrence plot is introduced to disclose the recurrence property consisting of only three peaks imposed by Slater's theorem. Noise effects on the statistics are studied. Our approach is demonstrated to be efficient in recognizing regular and chaotic trajectories of a Hamiltonian system with mixed phase space.