Abstract
A generalization of the Chirikov-Taylor model is introduced to study the dynamics of a charged particle in the field of an electrostatic wave packet with an arbitrary but finite number of harmonics. The dependence of both the edge of chaos (dissipative regime) and the deterministic diffusion on the wave packet width is predicted theoretically and confirmed numerically, including the case of relativistic particles. Diverse properties of the standard maps are shown to be non-universal in the framework of the wave-particle interaction, because these maps correspond to an infinite number of waves.