ON THE MULTIFRACTAL CHARACTER OF THE LORENZ ATTRACTOR

A detailed analysis of the Lorenz attractor in connection with generalized dimensions is presented in this work. Different methods have been employed to estimate these dimensions. Two of them are of standard type. A new method, based on the minimal spanning tree of the point distribution, is extensively tested in this work. It turns out that the Lorenz attractor is very appropriate for being analyzed through this technique, which produces a very clean estimate of the extrema scaling indices alpha(min) and alpha(max). The different methods give qualitatively the same result: The Lorenz attractor has a multifractal character.