Chaotic dynamics in a vertically driven planar pendulum (Q2653971)

The authors prove the existence of chaotic dynamics for a class of periodically forced second order ODEs including the vertically driven planar pendulum. The weight or parametric forcing is chosen as a rectangular wave pulse function which changes its sign. Then a combination of phase-plane analysis and results from the theory of topological horseshoes and linked twist maps are used in the proofs. The results are global (i.e., not relying on ``small perturbations'' techniques) and robust (i.e., persistent under small perturbations of the coefficients).