Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 610574, 13 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/610574
Research Article

Intermittent Behavior and Synchronization of Two Coupled Noisy Driven Oscillators

1Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Caixa Postal 19044, 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil
2Setor Escola Técnica, Universidade Federal do Paraná, UNED Paranaguá, 83215-750 Paranaguá, Paraná, Brazil

Received 12 September 2008; Revised 18 November 2008; Accepted 23 February 2009

Academic Editor: Elbert E. Neher Macau

Copyright © 2009 Ângela Maria dos Santos et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The coupled system of two forced Liénard-type oscillators has applications in diode-based electric circuits and phenomenological models for the heartbeat. These systems typically exhibit intermittent transitions between laminar and chaotic states; what affects their performance and, since noise is always present in such systems, dynamical models should include these effects. Accordingly, we investigated numerically the effect of noise in two intermittent phenomena: the intermittent transition to synchronized behavior for identical and unidirectionally coupled oscillators, and the intermittent transition to chaos near a periodic window of bidirectionally coupled oscillators. We found that the transition from a nonsynchronized to a synchronized state exhibits a power-law scaling with exponent 3/2 characterizing on-off intermittency. The inclusion of noise adds an exponential tail to this scaling.