Multiple Attractor Bifurcation in Three-Dimensional Piecewise Linear Maps

Multiple attractor bifurcations lead to simultaneous creation of multiple stable orbits. This may be damaging for practical systems as there is a fundamental uncertainty regarding which orbit the system will follow after a bifurcation. Such bifurcations are known to occur in piecewise smooth maps, which model many practical and engineering systems. So far the occurrence of such bifurcations have been investigated in the context of 2D piecewise linear maps. In this paper, we investigate multiple attractor bifurcations in a three-dimensional piecewise linear normal form map. We show the occurrence of different types of multiple attractor bifurcations in the system, like the simultaneous creation of a period-2 orbit, a period-3 orbit and an unstable chaotic orbit; a mode-locked torus, an ergodic torus and periodic orbits; a one-loop torus and a two-loop torus; a one-loop mode-locked torus and a two-loop mode-locked torus; a one-piece chaotic orbit and a 3-piece chaotic orbit, etc. As orbits lie on unstable manifolds of fixed points, the structure of unstable manifold plays an important role in understanding the coexistence of attractors. In this work, we show that interplay between 1D and 2D stable and unstable manifolds plays an important role in global bifurcations that can give rise to multiple coexisting attractors.