Chaotic attractors on a 3-torus, and torus break-up

Abstract Two coupled driven Van der Pol oscillators can have three-frequency quasiperiodic attractors, which lie on a 3-torus. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that the torus is destroyed when the stable and unstable manifolds of an unstable orbit become tangent. Furthermore, no chaotic orbits lying on a torus were observed, suggesting that, in most cases, at least in the case of this system, orbits do not become chaotic before their tori are destroyed. To expedite the calculations, a method was developed, which can be used to determine if an orbit is on a torus, without actually displaying that orbit. The method, also described in this paper, was designed specifically for our system. The basic idea, however, could be used for studying attractors of other systems. Very few modifications of the method, if any, would be necessary when studying systems with the number of degrees of freedom equal to that of our Van der Pol system.

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