OBSERVATION OF A FAST ROTATING WAVE IN RINGS OF COUPLED CHAOTIC OSCILLATORS

We report on the discovery of a transition in rings of coupled electro nic circuits in the chaotic regime to a collective periodic state char acterized by a time scale that is between two and three orders faster than that corresponding to an isolated circuit. This transition arises from a linear instability in the uniform synchronized state of the ri ng through a symmetric Hopf bifurcation. The same type of transition i s also observed for other coupled chaotic systems, e.g., a ring of Lor enz attractors.