Spatiotemporal chaos in spatially extended systems (Q5937527)

The nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) is considered as a model system for spatio-temporal chaos in spatially extended systems. It has been established that temporal chaos in such nearly integrable systems arises from underlying hyperbolic structures which can result in homoclinic orbits for the integrable PDEs describing the problem, and is therefore linked to linear instabilities in integrable soliton dynamics. Using the decay of mutual information to characterize spatio-temporal chaotic dynamics, the authors modify the dispersion of the NLS to obtain a system for which the number of unstable modes remains fixed while the domain size increases, in order to address the issue of finite-size effects. It is shown numerically that the model exhibits spatio-temporal chaos, too, in the presence of only two instable modes, and there exists a statistical correlation over the entire system, where there is only one unstable mode.