Systematic template extraction from chaotic attractors: II. Genus-one attractors with multiple unimodal folding mechanisms

Abstract

Asymmetric and symmetric chaotic attractors produced by the simplest jerk equivariant system are topologically characterized. In the case of this system with an inversion symmetry, it is shown that symmetric attractors bounded by genus-one tori are conveniently analyzed using a two-components Poincaré section. Resulting from a merging attractor crisis, these attractors can be easily described as being made of two folding mechanisms (here described as mixers), one for each of the two attractors co-existing before the crisis: symmetric attractors are thus described by a template made of two mixers. We thus developed a procedure for concatenating two mixers (here associated with unimodal maps) into a single one, allowing the description of a reduced template, that is, a template simplified under an isotopy. The so-obtained reduced template is associated with a description of symmetric attractors based on one-component Poincaré section as suggested by the corresponding genus-one bounding torus. It is shown that several reduced templates can be obtained depending on the choice of the retained one-component Poincaré section.