Random templex encodes topological tipping points in noise-driven chaotic dynamics

Abstract

Random attractors are the time-evolving pullback attractors of deterministically chaotic and stochastically perturbed dynamical systems. These attractors have a structure that changes in time and that has been characterized recently using Branched Manifold Analysis through Homologies cell complexes and their homology groups. This description has been further improved for their deterministic counterparts by endowing the cell complex with a directed graph (digraph), which encodes the order in which the cells in the complex are visited by the flow in phase space. A templex is a mathematical object formed by a cell complex and a digraph; it provides a finer description of deterministically chaotic attractors and permits their accurate classification. In a deterministic framework, the digraph of the templex connects cells within a single complex for all time. Here, we introduce the stochastic version of a templex. In such a random templex, there is one complex per snapshot of the random attractor and the digraph connects the generators or “holes” of successive cell complexes. Tipping points appear in a random templex as drastic changes of its holes in time, through their birth, splitting, merging, or death. This paper introduces random templexes and computes them for the noise-driven Lorenz system’s random attractor.