Blowout Bifurcation Route to Strange Nonchaotic Attractors.

Strange nonchaotic attractors are attractors that are geometrically strange, but have nonpositive Lyapunov exponents. We show that for dynamical systems with an invariant subspace in which there is a quasiperiodic torus, the loss of the transverse stability of the torus can lead to the birth of a strange nonchaotic attractor. A physical phenomenon accompanying this route to strange nonchaotic attractors is an extreme type of intermittency. [S0031-9007(96)01861-3]