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There are numerous physical situations in which a hole or leak is introduced in an otherwise closed chaotic system. The leak can have a natural origin, it can mimic measurement devices, and it can also be used to reveal dynamical properties of the closed system. A unified treatment of leaking systems is provided and applications to different physical problems, in both the classical and quantum pictures, are reviewed. The treatment is based on the transient chaos theory of open systems, which is essential because real leaks have finite size and therefore estimations based on the closed system differ essentially from observations. The field of applications reviewed is very broad, ranging from planetary astronomy and hydrodynamical flows to plasma physics and quantum fidelity. The theory is expanded and adapted to the case of partial leaks (partial absorption and/or transmission) with applications to room acoustics and optical microcavities in mind. Simulations in the lima çon family of billiards illustrate the main text. Regarding billiard dynamics, it is emphasized that a correct discrete-time representation can be given only in terms of the so-called true-time maps, while traditional Poincaré maps lead to erroneous results. Perron-Frobenius-type operators are generalized so that they describe true-time maps with partial leaks

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The dynamics of a passive particle in a hydrodynamical flow behind a cylinder is investigated. The velocity field has been determined both by a numerical simulation of the Navier-Stokes flow and by an analytically defined model flow. To analyze the Lagrangian dynamics, we apply methods coming from chaotic scattering: periodic orbits, time delay function, decay statistics. The asymptotic delay time statistics are dominated by the influence of the boundary conditions on the wall and exhibit algebraic decay. The short time behavior is exponential and represents hyperbolic effects.