filename : Buj20a.pdf entry : bookchapter conference : pages : year : 2020 month : title : Coreline Criteria for Inertial Particle Motion subtitle : author : Roxana Bujack and Soumya Dutta and Duan Zhang and Tobias Günther booktitle : Topological Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization VI ISSN/ISBN : editor : publisher : Springer publ.place : volume : issue : language : english keywords : flow visualization abstract : We extend the definition of the classic instantaneous vector field saddles, sinks, and sources to the finite-time setting by categorizing the domain based on the behavior of the flow map w.r.t. contraction or expansion. Since the intuitive Lagrangian approach turns out to be unusable in practice because it requires advection in unstable regions, we provide an alternative, sufficient criterion that can be computed in a robust way. We show that both definitions are objective, relate them to existing approaches, and show how the generalized critical points and their separatrices can be visualized.