Chaotic attractors in nonlinear dissipative systems of ordinary differential equations

Abstract

A mechanism is proposed describing the formation of irregular attractors in a wide class of three-dimensional nonlinear autonomous dissipative systems of ordinary differential equations with singular cycles. The attractors of such systems, called singular attractors, lie on two-dimensional surfaces in the phase space and have no positive Lyapunov exponents. In all systems of this class the onset of chaos follows the same universal mechanism: a cascade of Feigenbaum’s period doubling bifurcations, a subharmonic cascade of Sharkovskii’s bifurcations, and eventually a homoclinic cascade. All classical chaotic systems, including Lorenz, Rossler, and Chua systems, satisfy these conditions.