Taming chaos by impurities in two-dimensional oscillator arrays

The effect of impurities in a two-dimensional lattice of coupled nonlinear chaotic oscillators and their ability to control the dynamical behavior of the system are studied. We show that a single impurity can produce synchronized spatio-temporal patterns, even though all oscillators and the impurity are chaotic when uncoupled. When a small number of impurities is arranged in a way, that the lattice is divided into two disjoint parts, synchronization is enforced even for small coupling. The synchronization is not affected as the size of the lattice increases, although the impurity concentration tends to zero.