Observation of a Pomeau-Manneville intermittent route to chaos in a nonlinear oscillator

For a driven nonlinear semiconductor oscillator which shows a period-doubling pitchfork bifurcation route to chaos, we report an additional route to chaos: the Pomeau-Manneville intermittency route, characterized by a periodic (laminar) phase interrupted by bursts of aperiodic behavior. This occurs near a tangent bifurcation as the system driving parameter is reduced by from the threshold value for a periodic window. Data are presented for the dependence of the average laminar length 〈l〉 on, and also on additive random noise voltage. The results are in reasonable agreement with the intermittency theory of Hirsch, Huberman, and Scalapino. The distribution P (l) is also reported.