Chaotic Dynamical Systems

The Characteristic Lyapunov Exponents (CLE) are a natural extension of the linear stability analysis to aperiodic motion in dynamical systems. Roughly speaking, they measure the typical rates of the exponential divergence of nearby trajectories. This sensitive dependence on initial conditions is the main characteristic of deterministic chaos, which renders the forecasting of the dynamics practically impossible since the initial state of the system cannot be known with an infinite precision [Lichtenberg and Liebermann 1983, Eckmann and Ruelle 1985].