Chaotic synchronization of coupled ergodic maps

With few exceptions, studies of chaotic synchronization have focused on dissipative chaos. Though less well known, chaotic systems that lack dissipation may also synchronize. Motivated by an application in communication systems, we couple a family of ergodic maps on the N-torus and study the global stability of the synchronous state. While most trajectories synchronize at some time, there is a measure zero set that never synchronizes. We give explicit examples of these asynchronous orbits in dimensions two and four. On more typical trajectories, the synchronization error reaches arbitrarily small values and, in practice, converges. In dimension two we derive bounds on the average synchronization time for trajectories resulting from randomly chosen initial conditions. Numerical experiments suggest similar bounds exist in higher dimensions as well. Adding noise to the coupling signal destroys the invariance of the synchronous state and causes typical trajectories to desynchronize. We propose a modification of the standard coupling scheme that corrects this problem resulting in robust synchronization in the presence of noise.