Elements of Contemporary Theory of Dynamical Chaos: A Tutorial. Part I. Pseudohyperbolic Attractors

The paper is devoted to topical issues of modern mathematical theory of dynamical chaos and its applications. At present, it is customary to assume that dynamical chaos in finite-dimensional smooth systems can exist in three different forms. This is dissipative chaos, the mathematical image of which is a strange attractor; conservative chaos, for which the entire phase space is a large “chaotic sea” with randomly spaced elliptical islands inside it; and mixed dynamics, characterized by the principal inseparability in the phase space of attractors, repellers and conservative elements of dynamics. In the present paper (which opens a series of three of our papers), elements of the theory of pseudohyperbolic attractors of multidimensional maps and flows are presented. Such attractors, as well as hyperbolic ones, are genuine strange attractors, but they allow the existence of homoclinic tangencies. We describe two principal phenomenological scenarios for the appearance of pseudohyperbolic attractors in one-parameter families of three-dimensional diffeomorphisms, and also consider some basic examples of concrete systems in which these scenarios occur. We propagandize new methods for studying pseudohyperbolic attractors (in particular, the method of saddle charts, the modified method of Lyapunov diagrams and the so-called LMP-method for verification of pseudohyperbolicity of attractors) and test them on the above examples. We show that Lorenz-like attractors in three-dimensional generalized Hénon maps and in a nonholonomic model of Celtic stone as well as figure-eight attractors in the model of Chaplygin top are genuine (pseudohyperbolic) ones. Besides, we show an example of four-dimensional Lorenz model with a wild spiral attractor of Shilnikov–Turaev type that was found recently in [Gonchenko et al., 2018].

Homoclinic and Big Bang Bifurcations of an Embedding of 1D Allee’s Functions into a 2D Diffeomorphism

In this work a thorough study is presented of the bifurcation structure of an embedding of one-dimensional Allee’s functions into a two-dimensional diffeomorphism. A complete classification of the nature and stability of the fixed points, on the contour lines of the two-dimensional diffeomorphism, is provided. A necessary and sufficient condition so that the Allee fixed point is a snapback repeller is established. Sufficient conditions for the occurrence of homoclinic tangencies of a saddle fixed point of the two-dimensional diffeomorphism are also established, associated to the snapback repeller bifurcation of the endomorphism defined by the Allee functions. The main results concern homoclinic and big bang bifurcations of the diffeomorphism as “germinal” bifurcations of the Allee functions. Our results confirm previous predictions of structures of homoclinic and big bang bifurcation curves in dimension one and extend these studies to “local” concepts of Allee effect and big bang bifurcations to this two-dimensional exponential diffeomorphism.