Chaotic States of Anharmonic Systems in Periodic Fields

It is shown that the nonlinear dynamics of anharmonically interacting particles in the presence of periodic fields leads to a set of cascading bifurcations into a chaotic state. This state is characterized by the existence of a strange attractor in phase space and associated broadband noise in the spectral density. It is suggested that solid-state turbulence is likely to be found in weakly pinned charge-density-wave systems and superionic conductors.