Strange Nonchaotic Attractors in a Quasi-Periodically Forced Piecewise-Smooth System

The mechanism for the birth of Strange Nonchaotic Attractors (SNAs) in nonsmooth systems has become one of the important research topics in nonlinear dynamics. In this paper, we investigate a border-collision bifurcation route to SNAs in a quasi-periodically forced nonsmooth laser system. The birth of the SNA is caused by the loss of the transverse stability of the torus as it undergoes border-collision bifurcation, as identified through phase space analysis. The detected SNAs are analyzed by the phase sensitivity exponent, the largest Lyapunov exponent, power spectrum, singular continuous spectrum and the distribution of the local Lyapunov exponents. An interesting feature of border-collision bifurcation route is multipeaks and zeros in the distribution of the local Lyapunov exponents.