Arnold's cat map dynamics in a system of coupled nonautonomous van der Pol oscillators

An example of a flow system is presented with an attractor concentrated mostly at a surface of a two-dimensional torus, the dynamics on which is governed by the Arnold cat map. The system is composed of four coupled nonautonomous van der Pol oscillators. Three of them have equal characteristic frequencies, and in the other one the frequency is twice as large. The parameters controlling excitation of the two pairs of oscillators are forced to undergo a slow counterphase periodic modulation in time. At the end of the active stage for one pair of the oscillators, the excitation is passed to another pair, than back, and so on. In terms of a stroboscopic Poincaré section, the respective eight-dimensional (8D) mapping, due to strong phase volume compression, reduces approximately to a 2D map for the phases of one pair of the oscillators that corresponds approximately to the Arnold cat map. The largest two Lyapunov exponents (one positive and one negative) are close to those predicted with the cat map model. Estimates for the fractal dimension of the attractor of the Poincaré map are close to 2.