Chaotic Saddles in Wada Basin Boundaries and Their Bifurcations by the Generalized Cell-Mapping Digraph (GCMD) Method

By means of the generalized cell-mapping digraph (GCMD) method, we studybifurcations governing the escape of periodically forced oscillatorsfrom a potential well, in which a chaotic saddle plays an extremelyimportant role. In this paper, we find the chaotic saddle anddemonstrate that it is embedded in a strange fractalbasin boundary which has the Wada property that any point that is on theboundary of that basin is also simultaneously on the boundary of atleast two other basins. The chaotic saddle in the Wada basin boundary,by colliding with a chaotic attractor, leads to a chaotic boundarycrisis with indeterminate outcome. A local saddle-node fold bifurcation,if the saddle of the saddle-node fold is located in tangency with thechaotic saddle in the Wada basin boundary, also results in a strangeglobal phenomenon, namely that the local saddle-node fold bifurcation hasglobally indeterminate outcome. We also investigate the origin andevolution of the chaotic saddle in the Wada basin boundary, particularlyconcentrating on its discontinuous bifurcations (metamorphoses). Wedemonstrate that the chaotic saddle in the Wada basin boundary iscreated by a collision between two chaotic saddles in differentfractal basin boundaries. After a final escape bifurcation, there onlyexists the attractor at infinity and a chaotic saddle with a beautifulpattern is left behind in the phase space.