DYNAMICAL STRUCTURE FUNCTIONS AT CRITICAL BIFURCATIONS IN A BONHOEFFER-VAN DER POL EQUATION

Chaotic attractors at various bifurcations in a Bonhoeffer-van der Pol (BvP) equation are studied in terms of sigma(n)(q)-the variance of fl uctuations of the coarse-grained local expansion rates of nearby orbit s. For all the chaotic attractors of the BVP equation the sigma(n)(q) versus q plot exhibits a peak at q = q(alpha). We show that additional peaks, however, occur only for the attractors just before and after t he bifurcations such as crisis (sudden widening of a chaotic attractor ), band merging and type-I intermittency. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.