We study parameter families of quasiperiodically forced (qpf) circle maps with Diophantine frequency. Under certain C1-open conditions concerning their geometry, we prove that these families exhibit nonuniformly hyperbolic behaviour, often referred to as the existence of strange nonchaotic attractors, on parameter sets of positive measure. This provides a nonlinear version of results by Young on quasiperiodic SL (2;R)-cocycles and complements previous results in this direction which hold for sets of frequencies of positive measure, but did not allow for an explicit characterisation of these frequencies. As an application, we study a qpf version of the Arnold circle map and show that the Arnold tongue corresponding to rotation number 1/2 collapses on an open set of parameters. The proof requires to perform a parameter exclusion with respect to some twist parameter and is based on the multiscale analysis of the dynamics on certain dynamically defined critical sets. A crucial ingredient is to obtain good control on the parameter-dependence of the critical sets. Apart from the presented results, we believe that this step will be important for obtaining further information on the behaviour of parameter families like the qpf Arnold circle map.
We study invariant ergodic measures for quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphisms and derive that either the system is uniquely ergodic or any such measure is associated to some invariant multigraph.
We carry the argument used in the proof of the Theorem of Denjoy over to the quasiperiodically forced case. Thus we derive that if a system of quasiperiodically forced circle diffeomorphisms with bounded variation of the derivative has no invariant graphs with a certain kind of topological regularity, then the system is topologically transitive.
We show that a generic quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphism is mode-locked: the rotation number in the fibres is rationally related to the rotation number in the base and it is stable under small perturbations of the system. As a consequence, this implies that for a generic parameter family of quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphisms satisfying a twist condition, the graph of the rotation number as a function of the parameter is a devil's staircase.
We study quasiperiodically forced circle endomorphisms, homotopic to the identity, and show that under suitable conditions these exhibit uncountably many minimal sets with a complicated structure, to which we refer to as `strangely dispersed'. Along the way, we generalise some well-known results about circle endomorphisms to the uniquely ergodically forced case. Namely, all rotation numbers in the rotation interval of a uniquely ergodically forced circle endomorphism are realised on minimal sets, and if the rotation interval has non-empty interior then the topological entropy is strictly posit…
We prove that an analytic quasiperiodically forced circle flow with a not super-Liouvillean base frequency and which is close enough to some constant rotation is $C^{\infty}$ rotations reducible, provided its fibered rotation number is Diophantine with respect to the base frequency. As a corollary, we obtain that among such systems, the linearizable ones and those displaying mode-locking are locally dense for the $C^\infty$-topology.
We describe the relation between the dynamical properties of a quasiperiodically forced orientation-preserving circle homeomorphism and the behavior of the fibered rotation number with respect to strictly monotone perturbations. Despite the fact that the dynamics in the forced case can be considerably more complicated, the result we obtain is in perfect analogy with the one-dimensional situation. In particular, the fibered rotation number behaves strictly monotonically whenever the rotation vector is irrational. This answers a question posed by Herman (1983, Comm. Math. Helv.).
We study the phenomenon of mode-locking in the context of quasiperiodically forced non-linear circle maps. As a main result, we show that under certain C1-open condition on the geometry of twist parameter families of such systems, the closure of the union of modelocking plateaus has positive measure. In particular, this implies the existence of infinitely many mode-locking plateaus (open Arnold tongues). The proof builds on multiscale analysis and parameter exclusion methods in the spirit of Benedicks and Carleson, which were previously developed for quasiperiodic SL(2,R)-cocycles by Young and…
The occurrence of strange non-chaotic attractors (SNA) in quasiperiodically forced systems has attracted considerable interest over the last two decades, in particular since it provides a rich class of examples for the possibility of complicated dynamics in the absence of chaos. Their existence was discovered in the early 1980's, independently by Herman for quasiperiodic SL(2,R)-cocycles and by Grebogi et al for so-called 'pinched skew products'. However, except for these two particular classes there are still hardly any rigorous results on the topic, despite a large number of numerical studie…
Poincare's classification of the dynamics of homeomorphisms of the circle is one of the earliest, but still one of the most elegant, classification results in dynamical systems. Here we generalize this to quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphisms, which have been the subject of considerable interest in recent years. Herman already showed two decades ago that a unique rotation number exists for all orbits in the quasiperiodically forced case. However, unlike the unforced case, no a priori bounds exist for the deviations from the average rotation. This plays an important role in the attempt…
In [FJJK] the Sharkovskiĭ Theorem was extended to periodic orbits of strips of quasiperiodic skew products in the cylinder. In this paper we deal with the following natural question that arises in this setting: Does Sharkovskiĭ Theorem holds when restricted to curves instead of general strips?mWe answer this question in the negative by constructing a counterexample: We construct a map having a periodic orbit of period 2 of curves (which is, in fact, the upper and lower circles of the cylinder) and without any invariant curve. In particular this shows that there exist quasiperiodic skew product…
We extend the results and techniques from \cite{FJJK} to study the combinatorial dynamics (\emph{forcing}) and entropy of quasiperiodically forced skew-products on the cylinder. For these maps we prove that a cyclic permutation $τ$ forces a cyclic permutation $ν$ as interval patterns if and only if $τ$ forces $ν$ as cylinder patterns. This result gives as a corollary the Sharkovski\uı Theorem for quasiperiodically forced skew-products on the cylinder proved in \cite{FJJK}. Next, the notion of $s$-horseshoe is defined for quasiperiodically forced skew-products on the cylinder and it is proved, …
We study a Hamiltonian describing a pendulum coupled with several anisochronous oscillators, giving a simple construction of unstable KAM tori and their stable and unstable manifolds for analytic perturbations. We extend analytically the solutions of the equations of motion, order by order in the perturbation parameter, to a uniform neighbourhood of the time axis.
The aim of this paper is to show that the existence of attracting sets for quasiperiodically forced systems can be extended to appropriate skew-products on the cylinder, homotopic to the identity, in such a way that the general system will have (at least) one attracting set corresponding to every irrational rotation number ρin the rotation interval of the base map. This attracting set is a copy of the attracting set of the system quasiperiodically forced by a (rigid) rotation of angle ρ. This shows the co-existence of uncountably many attracting sets, one for each irrational in the rotation in…
We show that the classic example of quasiperiodically forced maps with strange nonchaotic attractors described by Grebogi et al and Herman in the mid-1980s have some chaotic properties. More precisely, we show that these systems exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, both on the whole phase space and restricted to the attractor. The results also remain valid in more general classes of quasiperiodically forced systems. Further, we include an elementary proof of a classic result by Glasner and Weiss on sensitive dependence, and we clarify the structure of the attractor in an example…
We describe a general procedure to construct topological extensions of given skew product maps with one-dimensional fibres, by blowing up a countable number of single points to vertical segments. This allows to produce various examples of unusual dynamics, including almost automorphic minimal sets of almost periodically forced systems, point-distal but non-distal homeomorpisms of the torus (as first constructed by Rees) or minimal sets of quasiperiodically forced interval maps which are not filled-in.
We study strange non-chaotic attractors in a class of quasiperiodically forced monotone interval maps known as pinched skew products. We prove that the probability of positive time-N Lyapunov exponents, with respect to the unique physical measure on the attractor, decays exponentially as N goes to infinity. The motivation for this work comes from the study of finite-time Lyapunov exponents as possible early-warning signals of critical transitions in the context of forced dynamics.
We construct different types of quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphisms with transitive but non-minimal dynamics. Concerning the recent Poincaré-like classification for this class of maps of Jaeger-Stark, we demonstrate that transitive but non-minimal behaviour can occur in each of the different cases. This closes one of the last gaps in the topological classification. Actually, we are able to get some transitive quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphisms with rather complicated minimal sets. For example, we show that, in some of the examples we construct, the unique minimal set is …
We study the geometric and topological properties of strange non-chaotic attractors created in non-smooth saddle-node bifurcations of quasiperiodically forced interval maps. By interpreting the attractors as limit objects of the iterates of a continuous curve and controlling the geometry of the latter, we determine their Hausdorff and box-counting dimension and show that these take distinct values. Moreover, the same approach allows to describe the topological structure of the attractors and to prove their minimality.
Non-smooth saddle-node bifurcations give rise to minimal sets of interesting geometry built of so-called strange non-chaotic attractors. We show that certain families of quasiperiodically driven logistic differential equations undergo a non-smooth bifurcation. By a previous result on the occurrence of non-smooth bifurcations in forced discrete time dynamical systems, this yields that within the class of families of quasiperiodically driven differential equations, non-smooth saddle-node bifurcations occur in a set with non-empty C2-interior.
The existence of non-continuous invariant graphs (or strange non-chaotic attractors) in quasiperiodically forced systems has generated great interest, but there are still very few rigorous results about the properties of these objects. In particular, it is not known whether the topological closure of such graphs is typically a filled-in set, i.e consists of a single interval on every fibre, or not. We give a positive answer to this question for the class of so-called pinched skew products, where non-continuous invariant graphs occur generically, provided the rotation number on the base is diop…
Let $Φ$ be a quasi-periodically forced quadratic map, where the rotation constant $ω$ is a Diophantine irrational. A strange non-chaotic attractor (SNA) is an invariant (under $Φ$) attracting graph of a nowhere continuous measurable function $ψ$ from the circle $\mathbb{T}$ to $[0,1]$. This paper investigates how a smooth attractor degenerates into a strange one, as a parameter $β$ approaches a critical value $β_0$, and the asymptotics behind the bifurcation of the attractor from smooth to strange. In our model, the cause of the strange attractor is a so-called torus collision, whereby an attr…
We consider a class of singular ordinary differential equations describing analytic systems of arbitrary finite dimension, subject to a quasi-periodic forcing term and in the presence of dissipation. We study the existence of response solutions, i.e. quasi-periodic solutions with the same frequency vector as the forcing term, in the case of large dissipation. We assume the system to be conservative in the absence dissipation, so that the forcing term is --- up to the sign --- the gradient of a potential energy, and both the mass and damping matrices to be symmetric and positive definite. Furth…
We study the effect of external forcing on the saddle-node bifurcation pattern of interval maps. By replacing fixed points of unperturbed maps by invariant graphs, we obtain direct analogues to the classical result both for random forcing by measure-preserving dynamical systems and for deterministic forcing by homeomorphisms of compact metric spaces. Additional assumptions like ergodicity or minimality of the forcing process then yield further information about the dynamics. The main difference to the unforced situation is that at the critical bifurcation parameter, two alternatives exist. In …
We consider a class of differential equations, $\ddot x + γ\dot x + g(x) = f(ωt)$, with $ω\in {\bf R}^{d}$, describing one-dimensional dissipative systems subject to a periodic or quasi-periodic (Diophantine) forcing. We study existence and properties of the limit cycle described by the trajectory with the same quasi-periodicity as the forcing. For $g(x)=x^{2p+1}$, $p\in {\bf N}$, we show that, when the dissipation coefficient is large enough, there is only one limit cycle and that it is a global attractor. In the case of other forces, including $g(x)=x^{2p}$ (with $p=1$ describing the varacto…
We study the behaviour of one-dimensional strongly dissipative systems subject to a quasi-periodic force. In particular we are interested in the existence of response solutions, that is quasi-periodic solutions having the same frequency vector as the forcing term. Earlier results available in the literature show that, when the dissipation is large enough and a suitable function involving the forcing has a simple zero, response solutions can be proved to exist and to be attractive provided some Diophantine condition is assumed on the frequency vector. In this paper we show that the results exte…
We propose a general mechanism by which strange non-chaotic attractors (SNA) are created during the collision of invariant curves in quasiperiodically forced systems. This mechanism is first discussed on an heuristic level and by means of simulations. In the considered examples, a stable and an unstable invariant circle undergo a saddle-node bifurcation, but instead of a neutral invariant curve there exists a strange non-chaotic attractor-repeller pair at the bifurcation point. This process is accompanied by a very characteristic behaviour of the invariant curves prior to their collision, whic…
We study the spatial spread of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) in coupled map lattices (CMLs) of quasiperiodically forced nonlinear maps. We use instantaneous speed (IS) and finite-time Lyapunov exponents (FTLEs) to investigate the role of strange non-chaotic attractors (SNAs) on the spatial spread of the OTOC. We find that these CMLs exhibit a characteristic on and off type of spread of the OTOC for SNA. Further, we provide a broad spectrum of the various dynamical regimes in a two-parameter phase diagram using IS and FTLEs. We substantiate our results by confirming the presence of SN…
Topological structure of minimal sets is studied for a dynamical system $(E,F)$ given by a fibre-preserving, in general non-invertible, continuous selfmap $F$ of a graph bundle $E$. These systems include, as a very particular case, quasiperiodically forced circle homeomorphisms. Let $M$ be a minimal set of $F$ with full projection onto the base space $B$ of the bundle. We show that $M$ is nowhere dense or has nonempty interior depending on whether the set of so called endpoints of $M$ is dense in $M$ or is empty. If $M$ is nowhere dense, we prove that either a typical fibre of $M$ is a Cantor …
