Transcritical loss of synchronization in coupled chaotic systems

The synchronization transition is described for a system of two asymmetrically coupled chaotic oscillators. Such a system can represent the two-cluster state in a large ensemble of globally coupled oscillators. It is shown that the transition can be typically mediated by a transcritical transversal bifurcation. The latter has a hard brunch that dominates the global dynamics, so that the synchronization transition is normally hard. For a particular example of coupled logistic maps a diversity of transition scenaria includes both local and global riddling. In the case of small non-identity of the interacting systems the riddling is shown to turn into an exterior or interior crisis. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.