On the unfolding of a blowout bifurcation

Suppose a chaotic attractor A in an invariant subspace loses stability on varying a parameter. At the point of loss of stability, the most positive Lyapunov exponent of the natural measure on A crosses zero at what has been called a 'blowout' bifurcation. We introduce the notion of an essential basin of an attractor A. This is the set of points x such that accumulation points of the sequence of measures 1/n Sigma(k=0)(n-1)delta(fk(x)) are supported on A. We characterise supercritical and subcritical scenarios according to whether the Lebesgue measure of the essential basin of A is positive or zero. We study a drift-diffusion model and a model class of piecewise linear mappings of the plane. In the supercritical case, we find examples where a Lyapunov exponent of the branch of attractors may be positive ('hyperchaos') or negative, depending purely on the dynamics far from the invariant subspace. For the mappings we find asymptotically linear scaling of Lyapunov exponents, average distance from the subspace and basin size on varying a parameter. We conjecture that these are general characteristics of blowout bifurcations.