Zuhoor Elahi
Publications:
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Elahi Z., Gull W.
Abstract
The damped-driven pendulum is a classical nonlinear oscillator whose periodic, quasiperiodic,
and chaotic responses are well known. The present paper studies a complementary global
question: how does a fixed forcing-phase slice of the initial-condition plane select the longtime
direction of rotational transport? The nondimensional pendulum equation is integrated
over two-dimensional grids of initial angle and initial velocity. After a transient interval is
removed, each trajectory is classified by its mean rotation number over a sampling interval,
giving a discrete partition into positive rotation, negative rotation, and libration or nearly zero
net rotation. A 300-point parameter screen over damping coefficient and forcing amplitude
is used to identify nontrivial regimes in which the initial-condition plane contains substantial
fractions of both positive- and negative-rotation outcomes. Four representative cases are then
analyzed in detail using transport-basin maps, continuous mean-rotation-number maps, basinfraction
statistics, finite-resolution boundary metrics, and representative trajectories. The selected
regimes show coherent curved basins of opposite rotational direction rather than isolated
single-trajectory behavior. The transition from positive-rotation-dominated to negative-rotationdominated
basin fractions across the selected parameter sequence demonstrates that the dominant
long-time direction in a fixed phase slice can change while both transport outcomes remain
present. Grid-resolution convergence, sampling-window convergence, and time-step checks for
representative interior points support the numerical stability of the reported basin fractions and
transport labels over the tested settings. The results do not claim a rigorous proof of fractal or
Wada basin boundaries; instead, they provide a reproducible finite-resolution characterization of
directional final-state predictability in a familiar dissipative nonlinear oscillator. The basinmap
approach complements standard phase portraits, Poincaré sections, and Lyapunov-type
diagnostics by showing how an ensemble of possible initial conditions partitions into different
long-time transport states.
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