About the Journal

Focus and Coverage

Chaos is a quarterly journal published by the American Institute of Physics and devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena and describing the manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines.

2008 Journal Citation Data from Thomson Reuters*:
Among the Top 10 high-impact journals in both Mathematical Physics and Applied Mathematics (Thomson Reuters, 2008)
Impact Factor = 2.152
Immediacy Index = 0.583
Cited Half-Life = 5.9
EigenFactor Score = 0.01503
Article Influence Score = 0.929

*Data from the 2008 Science Edition of Thomson Reuters's Journal Citation Reports ®.

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Motivation and Description

Historical Background

In the past two decades the "new science," known popularly as "chaos," has given us deep insights into previously intractable, inherently nonlinear, natural phenomena. Building on important but isolated historical precedents (such as the work of Poincaré), "chaos" has in some cases caused a fundamental reassessment of the way in which we view the physical world. For instance, certain seemingly simple natural nonlinear processes, for which the laws of motion are known and completely deterministic, can exhibit enormously complex behavior, often appearing as if they were evolving under random forces rather than deterministic laws. One consequence is the remarkable result that these processes, although completely deterministic, are essentially unpredictable for long times. But practitioners of "nonlinear science," as "chaos" has become known among experts, recognize that nonlinear phenomena can also exhibit equally surprising orderliness. For example, certain seemingly complex nonlinear systems, involving many interacting components, can exhibit great regularity in their motion, and "coherent structures" – such as the Red Spot of Jupiter – can emerge from a highly disordered background.

Paradigms of Nonlinear Science

Researchers in this new nonlinear science have learned to recognize the seemingly contradictory manifestations of chaos and order as two fundamental features of inherently nonlinear phenomena. Indeed, "deterministic chaos" and "coherent structures" are often referred to as two "paradigms" of nonlinear science, in the sense that they represent archetypical aspects of nonlinear phenomena, independent of the conventional discipline in which they are observed. Two other "paradigms" that have emerged from recent studies of nonlinear phenomena can be termed "pattern formation, competition, and selection" and "adaptation, evolution, and learning."

It is perhaps most convincing to clarify the impact of these paradigms by presenting examples of their interdisciplinary relevance. The same type of "deterministic chaos" can be observed, for example, in electrical activity from biological systems, in the transition of a fluid to turbulent motion, and in the motion of the moons of the giant planets. "Coherent structures" arise in the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter, in giant earth ocean waves ("tsunamis"), in the spatial spread of certain epidemics, and, on a microscopic scale, in the behavior of certain unusual solid state materials. "Pattern formation, competition, and selection" occur in very similar ways in such seemingly disparate phenomena as instabilities in secondary oil recovery techniques and laser–plasma interactions in advanced technologies designed to control fusion energy. Recent attempts to isolate the conceptual, as opposed to the biological, essence of life have identified and clarified the paradigm of "adaptation, evolution, and learning" and have led to extensive studies of mathematical models of "neural networks" and to the creation of the field of "artificial life."

Interdisciplinary Nature and Methodology of Nonlinear Science

As these examples suggest, nonlinear science is inherently interdisciplinary, impacting upon traditional subjects ranging through all the physical and biological sciences, mathematics, engineering, and many of the social sciences, notably economics and demographics. Any attempt to circumscribe artificially the scope of nonlinear science inevitably limits the insights it can provide.

Significantly, the successful pursuit of nonlinear science requires the blending of three distinct methodological approaches:

• "experimental mathematics," which involves the use of cleverly conceived computer-based numerical simulations to give qualitative insights into problems that are at present analytically intractable;

• novel and powerful analytical mathematical methods to treat functional recursion relations, to solve certain nonlinear partial differential equations, or to describe complex geometrical structures arising in chaotic systems; and

• high precision experimental observations of similar nonlinear phenomena in many different natural and man-made systems arising in a variety of conventional disciplines.

An important illustration of both this tripartite approach and the interdisciplinary applicability of the paradigms of nonlinear science is the discovery of the metric universality in unimodular one-dimensional maps. Many physicists considered Feigenbaum's results for the universal dynamics of these maps to be a mere mathematical curiosity of no clear physical significance until Libchaber and others observed exactly the same period doubling dynamics in laboratory experiments on fluids and electric circuits. The ensuing efforts to prove various aspects of the theory rigorously have greatly stimulated large segments of the pure mathematics community. Of course, the interaction can also go in other ways; laboratory observations of new nonlinear phenomena have also stimulated and guided the development of theory and mathematical modeling. This close interaction among experimenters, theorists, and pure mathematicians is rare and refreshing in the recent age of increasingly specialized science.

Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science

The now celebrated example of period doubling illustrates the crucial importance of transferring the developments in our understanding of nonlinear phenomena, wherever these developments occur, to other disciplines. The excitement and challenge of the journal, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, lie in its interdisciplinary character and its firm committment to communicating the most recent developments in nonlinear science to the research community at large. We welcome contributions from physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, engineering, economics, and social sciences, as well as other disciplines in which inherently nonlinear phenomena are of interest and importance. Further, we always seek a balance among the methods of computation, theory, and experiment, to reflect properly the tripartite methodology which has proved essential to the progress of nonlinear science. Finally, Chaos has grown to be truly international in character, again mirroring the field itself.

Uniqueness of Chaos

Chaos is a peer-reviewed research journal but with some unorthodox elements relative to typical journals. Besides front-line research papers, letters, and brief reports, Chaos includes solicited technical reviews and deliberately pedagogical articles of broad appeal. The Editors of Chaos take an active role in developing the content and, together with the AIP, seek to assure its comprehensibility, as well as relevance and quality. Importantly, approximately every other issue of Chaos is a special "Focus" issue. These issues are intended to provide a critical introduction and overview of a particular topic, suitable as an introduction to nonspecialists but also of value to experts in the area. To ensure timely publication of other articles, only about 60% of the articles in a "Focus" issue are devoted to the focal topic, with the remaining articles dealing with other areas of nonlinear science.

In addition, each article in Chaos is preceded by a "lead paragraph" targeted at the non-specialist reader. This paragraph provides a sense of the context of the work and conveys the primary results, but in language that is accessible to the journal's broad interdisciplinary audience.

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Editors

Editor-in-Chief

David K. Campbell
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Consulting Editors

Qi Ouyang 
Peking University, Beijing, China
Sudeshna Sinha 
Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani, Chennai, India

Editors

F. Tito Arecchi, Istituto Nazionale di Ottica, Florence, Italy
Stefano Boccaletti, CNR–Istituto dei SistemiComplessi, Florence, Italy
Elizabeth Bradley, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Leonid Bunimovich, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
William L. Ditto, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA
Robert E. Ecke, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA
Irving R. Epstein, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
Leon Glass, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada
John L. Hudson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Jürgen Kurths, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Anatoly I. Neishtadt, Space Research Institute, Moscow, Russia and Loughborough University, UK
Yasumasa Nishiura, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Lev A. Ostrovsky, Zel Technologies, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA, and Institute of Applied Physics, RAS, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Louis M. Pecora, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA
Kenneth Showalter, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA
Charles P. Tresser, on disability leave from IBM

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Advisory Board

Term ending 31 December 2009

Valentin Afraimovich (San Luis Potosi State University, San Luis Potosi, Mexico)

Michael Gorman (University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA)

Roger Grimshaw (Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom)

Yuri Kivshar (The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)

Vito Latora (Università di Catania, Catania, Italy)

Michael C. Mackey (McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada)

Anita Mehta (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA, USA)

Frank E. Moss (University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, USA)

Y. A. Stepanyants (University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia)

Z. Jane Wang (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA)

Amie M. Wilkinson (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA)

Term ending 31 December 2010

Reka Albert (Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA)

James Crutchfield (University of California, Davis, CA, USA)

Nir Davidson (Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel)

Ulrike Feudel (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany)

Raymond E. Goldstein (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom)

Peter Grassberger (University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany)

Jeff Hasty (University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA)

Tasso J. Kaper (Boston University, Boston, MA, USA)

Daniel P. Lathrop (University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA)

Herbert Levine (University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA)

Alexander S. Mikhailov (Fritz-Haber-Institut der MPG, Berlin, Germany)

Philip J. Morrison (University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA)

Hava T. Siegelmann (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA)

Tamas Tel (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary)

Term ending 31 December 2011

Lora Billings (Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA)

Thomas L. Carroll (U. S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA)

Anne De Wit (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium)

Theo Geisel (Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany)

Peter Jung (Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA)

Raymond E. Kapral (University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

Fabio Marchesoni (Università di Camerino, Camerino, Italy)

John Milton (The Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA, USA)

Erik Mosekilde (Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark)

Arkadi Pikovski (Postdam University, Potsdam, Germany)

Antonello Provenzale (Istituto di Cosmogeofisica del CNR, Turin, Italy)

Vered Rom-Kedar (The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel)

Dmitry Treschev (Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia)

Ichiro Tsuda (Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan)

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Editorial Office

Contact the Chaos Editorial Office at:

Janis Bennett

Chaos Editorial Office

American Institute of Physics

Suite 1NO1

2 Huntington Quadrangle

Melville, NY 11747-4502, USA

Telephone: 516-576-2403

Fax: 516-576-2223

E-mail: chaos@aip.org

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AIP Production Office

Authors of accepted manuscripts may contact the AIP Production Office at:

Editorial Supervisor

Chaos

American Institute of Physics

Suite 1NO1

2 Huntington Quadrangle

Melville, NY 11747-4502, USA

Telephone: 516-576-2384

Fax: 631-396-0060

E-mail: cha@aip.org

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