Control of chaos by capture and release

Why metabolic systems are rarely chaotic

One of the mysteries surrounding the phenomenon of chaos is that it can rarely be found in biological systems. This has led to many discussions of the possible presence and interpretation of chaos in biological signals. It has caused empirical biologists to be very sceptical of models that have chaotic properties or even employ chaos for problem solving tasks. In this paper, it is demonstrated that there exists a possible mechanism that is part of the catalytical reaction mechanisms which may be responsible for controlling enzymatic reactions such that they do not become chaotic. It is proposed that where these mechanisms are not present or not effective, chaos may still occur in biological systems.

Controlling chaos in a weakly coupled array of Bose-Einstein condensates

The spatial structure of a Bose-Einstein condensate loaded into an optical lattice potential is investigated and the spatially chaotic distributions of the condensates are revealed under the tight-binding approximation. Adding a laser pulse on a proper site of the lattice and treating it as a control signal, control of the chaos in the system is carried out by using the Ott-Grebogi-Yorker scheme. For an appropriate laser pulse, we can suppress the chaos and push the system onto a stable manifold of a target orbit. After the control, a regular distribution, which may be expected in experiments or practical applications, of the condensates in the coordinate space is obtained.