Shear-Induced Chaos

Guided by a geometric understanding developed in earlier works of Wang and Young, we carry out some numerical studies of shear-induced chaos. The settings considered include periodic kicking of limit cycles, random kicks at Poisson times, and continuous-time driving by white noise. The forcing of a quasi-periodic model describing two coupled oscillators is also investigated. In all cases, positive Lyapunov exponents are found in suitable parameter ranges when the forcing is suitably directed.