Devil's staircase route to chaos in a forced relaxation oscillator (Q1323152)

We use one-dimensional techniques to characterize the Devil's staircase route to chaos in a relaxation oscillator of the Van der Pol type with periodic forcing term. In particular, by using symbolic dynamics, we give the behaviour for certain range of parameters values of a Cantor set of solutions having a certain rotation set associated to a rational number. Finally, we explain the phenomena observed experimentally in the system by \textit{M. P. Kennedy}, \textit{K. R. Krieg} and \textit{L. O. Chua} [IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. 36, 1133-1139 (1989)] related with the appearance of secondary staircases intercalated into the primary staircases which were found by \textit{B. Van der Pol} and \textit{J. Van der Mark} [Nature 120 (1927)].