Model for deterministic chaos in pulsar radio signals and search for attractors in the Crab and Vela pulsars

We search for evidence of a chaotic attractor in data from the Vela and Crab pulsars and in a coherent turbulent plasma model for pulsar emission. Both the model and the observational data are tested using the method of time delays to reconstruct an attractor and the method of Grassberger & Procaccia to compute its dimension. The analysis is an attempt to compare theory with observation. The plasma model clearly shows a low-dimensional attractor; this result is confirmed by computing the largest Lyapunov exponent. There is no evidence for chaos in any of the pulsar data. A definitive test will require pulsar data of extremely high time resolution.