Blowout bifurcation and spatial mode excitation in the bubbling transition to turbulence

The transition to turbulence (spatio-temporal chaos) in a wide class of spatially extended dynamical system is due to the loss of transversal stability of a chaotic attractor lying on a homogeneous manifold (in the Fourier phase space of the system), causing spatial mode excitation. Since the latter manifests as intermittent spikes this has been called a bubbling transition. We present numerical evidences that this transition occurs due to the so-called blowout bifurcation, whereby the attractor as a whole loses transversal stability and becomes a chaotic saddle. We used a nonlinear three-wave interacting model with spatial diffusion as an example of this transition.