Chaotic light scattering from a system of osculating, conducting spheres

Feedback in the equations describing the scattering coefficients cause chaotic behavior in the scattering intensities from a system composed of a pair of osculating spheres. Unlike other systems which display chaos as a trajectory in phase space, this system exhibits chaotic behavior in a partial summation. As the region of osculation increases, tell-tale signs of chaos emerge, and the Lyapunov exponent, a measure of the system's mean rate of exponential error growth, is shown to be greater than zero in these chaotic regions. We show bifurcation diagrams which depict regions of transformation from stability to chaos, including periodic windows and super-cycles.