Scaling and interleaving of sub-system Lyapunov exponents for spatio-temporal systems

Abstract

The computation of the entire Lyapunov spectrum for extended dynamical systems is a very time consuming task. If the system is in a chaotic spatio-temporal regime it is possible to approximately reconstruct the Lyapunov spectrum from the spectrum of a sub-system in a very cost effective way. In this work we present a new rescaling method, which gives a significantly better fit to the original Lyapunov spectrum. It is inspired by the stability analysis of the homogeneous evolution in a one-dimensional coupled map lattice but appears to be equally valid in a much wider range of cases. We evaluate the performance of our rescaling method by comparing it to the conventional rescaling (dividing by the relative sub-system volume) for one and two-dimensional lattices in spatio-temporal chaotic regimes. In doing so we notice that the Lyapunov spectra for consecutive sub-system sizes are interleaved and we discuss the possible ways in which this may arise. Finally, we use the new rescaling to approximate quantities derived from the Lyapunov spectrum (largest Lyapunov exponent, Lyapunov dimension and Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy) finding better convergence as the sub-system size is increased than with conventional rescaling.