Two-parameter bifurcation study of the regularized long-wave equation.

Abstract

We perform a two-parameter bifurcation study of the driven-damped regularized long-wave equation by varying the amplitude and phase of the driver. Increasing the amplitude of the driver brings the system to the regime of spatiotemporal chaos (STC), a chaotic state with a large number of degrees of freedom. Several global bifurcations are found, including codimension-two bifurcations and homoclinic bifurcations involving three-tori and the manifolds of steady waves, leading to the formation of chaotic saddles in the phase space. We identify four distinct routes to STC; they depend on the phase of the driver and involve boundary and interior crises, intermittency, the Ruelle-Takens scenario, the Feigenbaum cascade, an embedded saddle-node, homoclinic, and other bifurcations. This study elucidates some of the recently reported dynamical phenomena.