NOISE-INDUCED CHAOS AND BACKWARD STOCHASTIC BIFURCATIONS IN THE LORENZ MODEL

Abstract

We study the phenomena of stochastic D- and P-bifurcations of randomly forced limit cycles for the Lorenz model. As noise intensity increases, regular multiple limit cycles of this model in a period-doubling bifurcations zone are deformed to be stochastic attractors that look chaotic (D-bifurcation) and their multiplicity is reduced (P-bifurcation). In this paper for the comparative investigation of these bifurcations, the analysis of Lyapunov exponents and stochastic sensitivity function technique are used. A probabilistic mechanism of backward stochastic bifurcations for cycles of high multiplicity is analyzed in detail. We show that for a limit cycle with multiplicity two and higher, a threshold value of the noise intensity which marks the onset of chaos agrees with the first backward stochastic bifurcation.