Border collision bifurcations in tantalus oscillator

Abstract

The Tantalus oscillator is a nonlinear system having a stable limit cycle. In this work we analytically obtain the Phase Transition Curve (PTC) finding a one-dimensional piecewise map which has a discontinuity. The map is defined by a function which was experimentally verified with an excellent consistency between theoretical and experimental results. We iterate the obtained map to predict the coupling behavior of the system under periodic perturbations, finding that it presents Periodicity Diagrams that display a high number of bistabilities. We experimentally show the occurrence of the predicted behaviors. Bifurcations among periodicities resulted Border Collision Bifurcations. Finally, by studying the Two-parametric Bifurcations Diagram we conjecture that there is at least one point in the diagram which corresponds to a Big Bang Bifurcation. This point appears when the perturbation intensity leads to the discontinuity loss in the PTC.