Perturbed on-off intermittency - art. no. 016220

A basic requirement for on-off intermittency to occur is that the system po ssesses an invariant subspace. We address how on-off intermittency manifest s itself when a perturbation destroys the invariant subspace. In particular , we distinguish between situations where the threshold for measuring the o n-off intermittency in numerical or physical experiments is much larger tha n or is comparable to the size of the perturbation. Our principal result is that, as the perturbation parameter increases from zero, a metamorphosis i n on-off intermittency occurs in the sense that scaling laws associated wit h physically measurable quantities change abruptly. A geometric analysis, a random-walk model, and numerical computations support the result.