Coexistence of Periodic, Chaotic and Hyperchaotic Attractors in a System Consisting of a Duffing Oscillator Coupled to a van der Pol Oscillator

Abstract

Undoubtedly, multistability represents one of the most followed venues for researchers working in the field of nonlinear science. Multistability refers to the situation where a combination of two or more attractors occurs for the same rank of parameters. However, to the best of our knowledge, the situation encountered in the relevant literature is never one where periodicity, chaos and hyperchaos coexist. In this article, we study a fourth-order autonomous dynamical system composing of a Duffing oscillator coupled to a van der Pol oscillator. Coupling consists in disturbing the amplitude of one oscillator with a signal proportional to the amplitude of the other. We exploit analytical and numerical methods (bifurcation diagrams, phase portraits, basins of attraction) to shed light on the plethora of bifurcation modes exhibited by the coupled system. Several ranks of parameters are revealed where the coupled system exhibits two or more competing behaviors. In addition to the transient dynamics, the most gratifying behavior reported in this article concerns the coexistence of four attractors consisting of a limit cycle of period-n, a pair of chaotic attractors and a hyperchaotic attractor. The impact of a fractional-order derivative is also examined. A physical implementation of the coupled oscillator system is performed and the PSpice simulations confirm the predictions of the theoretical study conducted in this work.