Parametric excitation and chaos through dust-charge fluctuation in a dusty plasma

Abstract

We consider a van der Pol-Mathieu (vdPM) equation with parametric forcing, which arises in a simplified model of dusty plasma with dust-charge fluctuation. We make a detailed numerical investigation and show that the system can be driven to chaos either through a period doubling cascade or though a subcritical pitchfork bifurcation over an wide range of parameter space. We also discuss the frequency entrainment or frequency-locked phase of the dust-charge fluctuation dynamics and show that the system exhibits 2:1 parametric resonance away from the chaotic regime.