Active control and global synchronization of the complex Chen and Lu systems

Chaos synchronization is a very important nonlinear phenomenon, which has been studied to date extensively on dynamical systems described by real variables. There also exist, however, interesting cases of dynamical systems, where the main variables participating in the dynamics are complex, for example, when amplitudes of electromagnetic fields are involved. Another example is when chaos synchronization is used for communications, where doubling the number of variables may be used to increase the content and security of the transmitted information. It is also well-known that similar generalization of the Lorenz system to one with complex ODEs has been introduced to describe and simulate the physics of a detuned laser and thermal convection of liquid flows. In this paper, we study chaos synchronization by applying active control and Lyapunov function analysis to two such systems introduced by Chen and Lu. First we show that, written in terms of complex variables, these systems can have chaotic dynamics and exhibit strange attractors. We calculate numerically the values of the parameters at which these attractors exist. Active control and global synchronization techniques are then applied to study the phenomenon of chaos synchronization. Analytical criteria concerning the stability of these techniques are implemented and excellent agreement is found upon comparison with numerical experiments. In particular, studying the time evolution of "errors" ( or differences between drive and control dynamics), we show that both techniques are very effective for controlling the behavior of these systems, even in regimes of very strong chaos.