Labyrinthine pathways towards supercycle attractors in unimodal maps

Abstract

As an important preceding step for the demonstration of an uncharacteristic (q-deformed) statisticalmechanical structure in the dynamics of the Feigenbaum attractor we uncover previously unknown properties of the family of periodic superstable cycles in unimodal maps. Amongst the main novel properties are the following: i) The basins of attraction for the phases of the cycles develop fractal boundaries of increasing complexity as the period-doubling structure advances towards the transition to chaos. ii) The fractal boundaries, formed by the pre-images of the repellor, display hierarchical structures organized according to exponential clusterings that manifest in the dynamics as sensitivity to the final state and transient chaos. iii) There is a functional composition renormalization group (RG) fixed-point map associated with the family of supercycles. iv) This map is given in closed form by the same kind of q-exponential function found for both the pitchfork and tangent bifurcation attractors. v) There is final-stage ultra-fast dynamics towards the attractor, with a sensitivity to initial conditions which decreases as an exponential of an exponential of time. We discuss the relevance of these properties to the comprehension of the discrete scale-invariance features, and to the identification of the statistical-mechanical framework present at the period-doubling transition to chaos. This is the first of three studies (the other two are quoted in the text) which together lead to a definite conclusion about the applicability of q-statistics to the dynamics associated to the Feigenbaum attractor.