Spatiotemporal chaos control in two-wave driven systems

Spatiotemporal chaos control is considered by taking a one-dimensional driven/damped nonlinear drift-wave equation as a model. We apply an additional sinusoidal wave to suppress spatiotemporal chaos, and the system becomes a two-sinusoidal-wave driven system (the original driving wave with frequency ω and an additional controlling wave with frequency Ω). Numerical simulations show that when the frequency of the controlling wave is in the proper range, spatiotemporal chaos can be modified into a regular state where the amplitudes of all modes vary periodically with frequency Ω-ω while the phases of all modes evolve quasi-periodically with a running frequency Ω overlapped by a small modulation of frequency Ω-ω. The physical reason for this peculiar phenomenon is attributed to a frequency entrainment in the competition of the two external waves. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2007