OSCILLATIONS ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS VIA DISSIPATION AND DIFFUSION

The primary purpose of this paper is to show that simple dissipation can bring about oscillations in certain kinds of asymptotically stable nonlinear dynamical systems; namely when the system is locally active where the dissipation is introduced. Furthermore, if these nonlinear dynamical systems are coupled with appropriate choice of diffusion coefficients, then the coupled system can exhibit spatio-temporal oscillations. The secondary purpose of this paper is to show that spatio-temporal oscillations can occur in spatially discrete reaction diffusion equations operating on the edge of chaos, provided the array size is sufficiently large.