PERSISTENCE OF SUPERTRANSIENTS OF SPATIOTEMPORAL CHAOTIC DYNAMICAL-SYSTEMS IN NOISY ENVIRONMENT

Superlong chaotic transients have been discovered in numerical simulat ions of model spatiotemporal chaotic dynamical systems. The presence o f such transients poses a fundamental difficulty for observing the asy mptotic state of the system. In this paper, we investigate the effect of small random noise on the lifetime of the chaotic transient, It is found that the averaged transient lifetime scales algebraically with t he amplitude of the noise, with a near-zero exponent. This indicates t hat the transient lifetime is almost independent of the noise amplitud e and, consequently, the presence of noise is not advantageous in atte mpts to reduce the transient lifetime. Therefore, we expect supertrans ients to be common in spatially-extended chaotic systems.