Horseshoe-shaped maps in chaotic dynamics of long Josephson junction driven by biharmonic signals (Q1581734)

The authors consider chaotic responses of the long Josephson junction to a biharmonic driven signal and constant dc-driven field with breather initial conditions. They view this as a damped, constant dc-driven sine-Gordon equation with biharmonic signal boundary conditions. A variational method type collective coordinate approach, originated by Legrand and Reinisch, allows the reduction to a Hamiltonian ODE. The authors apply a non-standard version of Melnikov's method introduced by \textit{St. Wiggins} [Global bifurcations and chaos, Springer-Verlag (1988; Zbl 0661.58001)] to find critical values for the transverse homoclinic bifurcation, which yields chaotic dynamics, in particular a Smale horseshoe. These results are guided by numerical experiments.