Short chaotic strings and their behaviour in the scaling region

Coupled map lattices are a paradigm of higher-dimensional dynamical systems exhibiting spatio-temporal chaos. A special case of non-hyperbolic maps are one-dimensional map lattices of coupled Chebyshev maps with periodic boundary conditions, called chaotic strings. In this short note we show that the fine structure of the self energy of this chaotic string in the scaling region (i.e. for very small coupling) is retained if we reduce the length of the string to three lattice points. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.