Controlling chaos

It is shown that one can convert a chaotic attractor to any one of a large number of possible attracting time-periodic motions by making only small time-dependent perturbations of an available system parameter. The method utilizes delay coordinate embedding, and so is applicable to experimental situations in which a priori analytical knowledge of the system dynamics is not available. Important issues include the length of the chaotic transient preceding the periodic motion, and the effect of noise. These are illustrated with a numerical example.