Coupled skinny baker's maps and the Kaplan-Yorke conjecture

The Kaplan-Yorke conjecture states that for "typical" dynamical systems with a physical measure, the information dimension and the Lyapunov dimension coincide. We explore this conjecture in a neighborhood of a system for which the two dimensions do not coincide because the system consists of two uncoupled subsystems. We are interested in whether coupling "typically" restores the equality of the dimensions. The particular subsystems we consider are skinny baker's maps, and we consider uni-directional coupling. For coupling in one of the possible directions, we prove that the dimensions coincide for a prevalent set of coupling functions, but for coupling in the other direction we show that the dimensions remain unequal for all coupling functions. We conjecture that the dimensions prevalently coincide for bi-directional coupling. On the other hand, we conjecture that the phenomenon we observe for a particular class of systems with uni-directional coupling, where the information and Lyapunov dimensions differ robustly, occurs more generally for many classes of uni-directionally coupled systems (also called skew-product systems) in higher dimensions.Comment: 33 pages, 3 figure

Stretched exponential estimates on growth of the number of periodic points for prevalent diffeomorphisms, I.

For diffeomorphisms of smooth compact finite-dimensional manifolds, we consider the problem of how fast the number of periodic points with period $n$ grows as a function of $n$. In many familiar cases (e.g., Anosov systems) the growth is exponential, but arbitrarily fast growth is possible; in fact, the first author has shown that arbitrarily fast growth is topologically (Baire) generic for $C^2$ or smoother diffeomorphisms. In the present work we show that, by contrast, for a measure-theoretic notion of genericity we call "prevalence", the growth is not much faster than exponential. Specifically, we show that for each $\rho, \delta > 0$, there is a prevalent set of $C^{1+\rho}$ (or smoother) diffeomorphisms for which the number of periodic $n$ points is bounded above by $\exp(C n^{1+\delta})$ for some $C$ independent of $n$. We also obtain a related bound on the decay of hyperbolicity of the periodic points as a function of $n$, and obtain the same results for $1$-dimensional endomorphisms. The contrast between topologically generic and measure-theoretically generic behavior for the growth of the number of periodic points and the decay of their hyperbolicity show this to be a subtle and complex phenomenon, reminiscent of KAM theory. Here in Part I we state our results and describe the methods we use. We complete most of the proof in the $1$-dimensional $C^2$-smooth case and outline the remaining steps, deferred to Part II, that are needed to establish the general case. The novel feature of the approach we develop in this paper is the introduction of Newton Interpolation Polynomials as a tool for perturbing trajectories of iterated maps

Comment on "Long Time Evolution of Phase Oscillator Systems" [Chaos 19,023117 (2009), arXiv:0902.2773]

A previous paper (arXiv:0902.2773, henceforth referred to as I) considered a general class of problems involving the evolution of large systems of globally coupled phase oscillators. It was shown there that, in an appropriate sense, the solutions to these problems are time asymptotically attracted toward a reduced manifold of system states (denoted M). This result has considerable utility in the analysis of these systems, as has been amply demonstrated in recent papers. In this note, we show that the analysis of I can be modified in a simple way that establishes significant extensions of the range of validity of our previous result. In particular, we generalize I in the following ways: (1) attraction to M is now shown for a very general class of oscillator frequency distribution functions g(\omega), and (2) a previous restriction on the allowed class of initial conditions is now substantially relaxed

Synchronization in large directed networks of coupled phase oscillators

We extend recent theoretical approximations describing the transition to synchronization in large undirected networks of coupled phase oscillators to the case of directed networks. We also consider extensions to networks with mixed positive/negative coupling strengths. We compare our theory with numerical simulations and find good agreement