Chaos and inertial effects in an anharmonic oscillator (Q1193678)

The authors study the behavior of a superconducting quantum magnetometer which approximately can be modelled by an equation analogous to that of the damped nonlinear pendulum under periodic external excitation. Here the driving is given by a train of rectangular pulses of alternating sign distributed periodically in time. The authors concentrate on the dependence of the dynamics of the system on the duration of the pulse keeping the frequency constant. The amplitude is chosen in such a way that the product of amplitude times duration is one. Especially short impulses are shown to give interesting results. Various possibilities for the occurence of chaotic behavior are found.