Multiple Attractor Bifurcations: A Source of Unpredictability in Piecewise Smooth Systems

There exists a variety of physically interesting situations described by continuous maps that are nondifferentiable on some surface in phase space. Such systems exhibit novel types of bifurcations in which multiple coexisting attractors can be created simultaneously. The striking feature of these bifurcations is that in the presence of arbitrarily small noise they lead to fundamentally unpredictable behavior of orbits as a system parameter is varied slowly through its bifurcation value. This unpredictability gradually disappears as the speed of variation of the system parameter through the bifurcation is reduced to zero.