Narrow Results

Recent progress towards an understanding of fluctuational escape from chaotic attractors (CAs) is reviewed and discussed in the contexts of both continuous systems and maps. It is shown that, like the simpler case of escape from a regular attractor, a unique most probable escape path (MPEP) is followed from a CA to the boundary of its basin of attraction. This remains true even where the boundary structure is fractal. The importance of the boundary conditions on the attractor is emphasized. It seems that a generic feature of the escape path is that it passes via certain unstable periodic orbits. The problems still remaining to be solved are identified and considered.

Even if a system has only one stable equilibrium point, its dynamics can still be complicated. In the case of the equilibrium point with a complicated boundary of the attraction basin, it is probably difficult to predict the long-term behavior of the trajectory starting from a point outside but near the boundary. The exploration of such systems is helpful for deepening our understanding of the dynamics of complex systems. This paper studies a class of three-dimensional polynomial systems with a nonelementary singularity. With parameters satisfying some conditions, the asymptotic stability of the origin is proved and the complexity of the attraction basin is investigated. It is demonstrated that the boundary of the attraction basin of the origin has a fractal structure in the following sense: An invariant set homeomorphic to the well-known Lorenz strange attractor is contained in the basin boundary. Based on the non-negative function we constructed, how fast a trajectory of the system tends to the asymptotically stable nonelementary singularity is measured.