On explosion of the chaotic attractor

Abstract

There are presented examples of the rather sudden and violent explosion of the strange attractor of a one-dimensional driven damped anharmonic oscillator induced by a relatively small change of the amplitude of the strongly nonperturbative periodic driving force. A phenomenologic characterization of the explosion of the strange attractor has been given in terms of the behavior of the average maximal Lyapunov exponent $\bar{\lambda }$ and that of the fractal dimension $D_q$ for $q=-4$. It is shown that the building up of the exploding strange attractor is accompanied by a nearly linear increase of the maximal average Lyapunov exponent $\bar{\lambda }$. A sudden jump of the fractal dimension $D_{-4}$ is detected when the explosion starts off from an attractor consisting of disjoint bunches separated by an empty phase-space region.

14 pages, 13 figures