Effect of noise on coupled chaotic systems

The effect of noise in inducing order on various chaotically evolving systems is reviewed, with special emphasis on systems consisting of coupled chaotic elements. In many situations it is observed that the uncoupled elements when driven by identical noise, show synchronization phenomena where chaotic trajectories exponentially converge towards a single noisy trajectory, independent of the initial conditions. In a random neural network, with infinite range coupling, chaos is suppressed due to noise and the system evolves towards a fixed point. Spatiotemporal stochastic resonance phenomenon has been observed in a square array of coupled threshold devices where a temporal characteristic of the system resonates at a given noise strength. In a chaotically evolving coupled map lattice with the logistic map as local dynamics and driven by identical noise at each site, we report that the number ofstructures (a structure is a group of neighbouring lattice sites for values of the variable follow which the certain predefined pattern) follows a power-law decay with the length of the structure. An interesting phenomenon, which we callstochastic coherence, is also reported in which the abundance and lifetimes of these structures show characteristic peaks at some intermediate noise strength.