Chaos in high-dimensional dissipative dynamical systems

For dissipative dynamical systems described by a system of ordinary differential equations, we address the question of how the probability of chaotic dynamics increases with the dimensionality of the phase space. We find that for a system of d globally coupled ODE’s with quadratic and cubic non-linearities with randomly chosen coefficients and initial conditions, the probability of a trajectory to be chaotic increases universally from ~10(−5) − 10(−4) for d = 3 to essentially one for d ~ 50. In the limit of large d, the invariant measure of the dynamical systems exhibits universal scaling that depends on the degree of non-linearity, but not on the choice of coefficients, and the largest Lyapunov exponent converges to a universal scaling limit. Using statistical arguments, we provide analytical explanations for the observed scaling, universality, and for the probability of chaos.