Mutual Interplay between the Break-Up of Spatial Order and the Onset of Low-Dimensional Temporal Chaos in an Exemplary Semiconductor System

Abstract

Partially all branches of modern science ranging from physics through chemistry and biology to economics and sociology deal with complex nonlinear systems the dynamics of which may acquire a macroscopic spatial, temporal, or functional structure without specific interference from the outside. Such ubiquitous processes of spontaneous self-organization can in general be formulated as nonequilibrium order-disorder phase transitions. The basic idea for the underlying unifying approach stems from that of synergetics¹ and information thermodynamics.² It implies that we consider open systems capable of decomposing into a potentially large number of competing individual subparts. In our quest to understand how structures are generated by nature, the mutual interaction among these subsystems, or say variables, is of fundamental importance in the neighborhood of critical instability points where only a few collective degrees of freedom, often called order parameters, dominate the global system behavior. Those coherent variables force the subsystems to join an organized motion, just giving the total system its specific structure or order. Most characteristically, it turns out that the detailed nature of any particular subsystem becomes unessential, ensuing the universal character of pattern-forming processes.