DETERMINISTIC CHAOS IN SERIALLY COUPLED CHEMICAL OSCILLATORS

Two oscillatory Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions are serially mass coupled to generate additional periodic states, period doubling, phase locking, quasiperiodicity, and chaos. The time series for these states are characterized in terms of their power spectra, attractors (reconstructed by singular value decomposition), Poincare sections, return maps, Lyapunov exponents, and various dimensionalities (D(q) spectra). Adding trace impurities to the system does not alter the observed chaos. Model calculations using a partially reversible Oregonator model qualitatively agree with the experimental findings for the coupled oscillators.