From quasiperiodicity to chaos in the Belousov–Zhabotinskii reaction. I. Experiment

Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of both a primary and a secondary Hopf bifurcation leading to quasiperiodicity in the Belousov–Zhabotinskii reaction. When taking the BZ system away from these local conditions, we witness the occurrence of chaos which comes with the breaking of the underlying torus into a fractal object. We emphasize that most of the alternating periodic–chaotic sequences studied in the literature are reminiscent of such two-frequency dynamics. We argue about the controversal existence of deterministic chaos in such sequences. We anticipate the results of a numerical and theoretical investigation of these sequences which discards definitely any stochastic objection to chemical chaos.