An Empirical Argument for Nontechnical Public Members on Advisory Committees: FDA As a Model

A discussion of the results of two surveys of present and past members of Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committees. The views and understanding of the issues before various categories of membership are compared and contrasted. It appears that technical members of advisory committees would generally welcome more participation by persons who lack special subject matter expertise

Different routes to chaos via strange nonchaotic attractor in a quasiperiodically forced system

This paper focusses attention on the strange nonchaotic attractors (SNA) of a quasiperiodically forced dynamical system. Several routes, including the standard ones by which the appearance of strange nonchaotic attractors takes place, are shown to be realizable in the same model over a two parameters ($f-\epsilon$) domain of the system. In particular, the transition through torus doubling to chaos via SNA, torus breaking to chaos via SNA and period doubling bifurcations of fractal torus are demonstrated with the aid of the two parameter ($f-\epsilon$) phase diagram. More interestingly, in order to approach the strange nonchaotic attractor, the existence of several new bifurcations on the torus corresponding to the novel phenomenon of torus bubbling are described. Particularly, we point out the new routes to chaos, namely, (1) two frequency quasiperiodicity $\to$ torus doubling $\to$ torus merging followed by the gradual fractalization of torus to chaos, (2) two frequency quasiperiodicity $\to$ torus doubling $\to$ wrinkling $\to$ SNA $\to$ chaos $\to$ SNA $\to$ wrinkling $\to$ inverse torus doubling $\to$ torus $\to$ torus bubbles followed by the onset of torus breaking to chaos via SNA or followed by the onset of torus doubling route to chaos via SNA. The existence of the strange nonchaotic attractor is confirmed by calculating several characterizing quantities such as Lyapunov exponents, winding numbers, power spectral measures and dimensions. The mechanism behind the various bifurcations are also briefly discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, ReVTeX (to appear in Phys. Rev. E

Bifurcation and chaos in the double well Duffing-van der Pol oscillator: Numerical and analytical studies

The behaviour of a driven double well Duffing-van der Pol (DVP) oscillator for a specific parametric choice ($\mid \alpha \mid =\beta$) is studied. The existence of different attractors in the system parameters ($f-\omega$) domain is examined and a detailed account of various steady states for fixed damping is presented. Transition from quasiperiodic to periodic motion through chaotic oscillations is reported. The intervening chaotic regime is further shown to possess islands of phase-locked states and periodic windows (including period doubling regions), boundary crisis, all the three classes of intermittencies, and transient chaos. We also observe the existence of local-global bifurcation of intermittent catastrophe type and global bifurcation of blue-sky catastrophe type during transition from quasiperiodic to periodic solutions. Using a perturbative periodic solution, an investigation of the various forms of instablities allows one to predict Neimark instablity in the $(f-\omega)$ plane and eventually results in the approximate predictive criteria for the chaotic region.Comment: 15 pages (13 figures), RevTeX, please e-mail Lakshmanan for figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. E. (E-mail: [email protected]

Estimation of System Parameters in Discrete Dynamical Systems from Time Series

We propose a simple method to estimate the parameters involved in discrete dynamical systems from time series. The method is based on the concept of controlling chaos by constant feedback. The major advantages of the method are that it needs a minimal number of time series data and is applicable to dynamical systems of any dimension. The method also works extremely well even in the presence of noise in the time series. The method is specifically illustrated by means of logistic and Henon maps.Comment: 4 page

Effect of Phase Shift in Shape Changing Collision of Solitons in Coupled Nonlinear Schroedinger Equations

Soliton interactions in systems modelled by coupled nonlinear Schroedinger (CNLS) equations and encountered in phenomena such as wave propagation in optical fibers and photorefractive media possess unusual features : shape changing intensity redistributions, amplitude dependent phase shifts and relative separation distances. We demonstrate these properties in the case of integrable 2-CNLS equations. As a simple example, we consider the stationary two-soliton solution which is equivalent to the so-called partially coherent soliton (PCS) solution discussed much in the recent literature.Comment: 11 pages, revtex4,Two eps figures. European Journal of Physics B (to appear

Secure Communication using Compound Signal from Generalized Synchronizable Chaotic Systems

By considering generalized synchronizable chaotic systems, the drive-auxiliary system variables are combined suitably using encryption key functions to obtain a compound chaotic signal. An appropriate feedback loop is constructed in the response-auxiliary system to achieve synchronization among the variables of the drive-auxiliary and response-auxiliary systems. We apply this approach to transmit analog and digital information signals in which the quality of the recovered signal is higher and the encoding is more secure.Comment: 7 pages (7 figures) RevTeX, Please e-mail Lakshmanan for figures, submitted to Phys. Lett. A (E-mail: [email protected]