Effect of the phase on the dynamics of a perturbed bouncing ball system

The phase control method is a non-feedback control technique which has been used for different purposes in continuous periodically driven dynamical systems. One of the main goals of this paper is to apply this control technique to the bouncing ball system, which can be seen as a paradigmatic periodically driven discrete dynamical system, and has a rather simple physical interpretation. The main idea is to apply a periodic control signal including a phase difference with respect to the periodic forcing of the initial system and to analyze its effect on the dynamics of the bouncing ball system. The numerical simulations we have carried out clearly show the strong effect of the phase of the control signal in suppressing or generating chaotic behavior and in changing the period of a periodic orbit. We have also analyzed the effect of the phase in the phenomenon of the crisis-induced intermittency, showing how the phase enhances the size of the attractor near a crisis and can induce the intermittent behavior. Finally we have analyzed the scaling behavior of the crisis by varying the phase difference between the perturbation and the external forcing.