Experimental Observation of On-Off Intermittency

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We observe on-off intermittency in a nonlinear electronic circuit tuned near a Hopf bifurcation point. The circuit is driven randomly through the bifurcation point, resulting in intermittent switching between a fixed point (laminar phase) and a limit cycle. The distribution of lengths of laminar phases exhibits -3/2 power law scaling for shorter phases, and an exponential drop for longer phases, due to noise in the system. These results agree with a theoretically predicted distribution. In addition, the crossover from power law to exponential decay obeys the predicted scaling law.