Critical Behavior of Period Doublings in Coupled Inverted Pendulums

Abstract

We study the critical behaviors of period doublings in N (N=2,3,4,...) coupled inverted pendulums by varying the driving amplitude $A$ and the coupling strength $c$. It is found that the critical behaviors depend on the range of coupling interaction. In the extreme long-range case of global coupling, in which each inverted pendulum is coupled to all the other ones with equal strength, the zero-coupling critical point and an infinity of critical line segments constitute the same critical set in the $A-c$ plane, independently of $N$. However, for any other nonglobal-coupling cases of shorter-range couplings, the structure of the critical set becomes different from that for the global-coupling case, because of a significant change in the stability diagram of periodic orbits born via period doublings. The critical scaling behaviors on the critical set are also found to be the same as those for the abstract system of the coupled one-dimensional maps.