Experimental Observation of Multiple Attractor Bifurcation in an Electronic Circuit

Multiple attractor bifurcations occurring in piecewise smooth dynamical systems may lead to potentially damaging situations. The striking feature of these bifurcations is that, in the presence of arbitrarily small noise, they lead to fundamentally unpredictable behavior of orbits as a system parameter is varied through its bifurcation value. In earlier works, the conditions of occurrence of multiple attractor bifurcation were reported in the context of a piecewise linear 2-D map. In this brief, we report the first experimental observation of this phenomenon in an electronic switching system.