Universal visibility patterns of unimodal maps

Abstract

We explore the order in chaos by studying the geometric structure of time series that can be deduced from a visibility mapping. This visibility mapping associates to each point $(t,x(t))$ of the time series to its horizontal visibility basin, i.e. the number of points of the time series that can be seen horizontally from each respective point. We apply this study to the class of unimodal maps that give rise to equivalent bifurcation diagrams. We use the classical logistic map to illustrate the main results of this paper: there are visibility patterns in each cascade of the bifurcation diagram, converging at the onset of chaos. The visibility pattern of a periodic time series is generated from elementary blocks of visibility in a recursive way. This rule of recurrence applies to all periodic-doubling cascades. Within a particular window, as the growth parameter $r$ varies and each period doubles, these blocks are recurrently embedded forming the visibility pattern for each period. In the limit, at the onset of chaos, an infinite pattern of visibility appears containing all visibility patterns of the periodic time series of the cascade. We have seen that these visibility patterns have specific properties: (i) the size of the elementary blocks depends on the period of the time series, (ii) certain time series sharing the same periodicity can have different elementary blocks and, therefore, different visibility patterns, (iii) since the 2-period and 3-period windows are unique, the respective elementary blocks, $ \{2\} $ and $ \{2 \, 3\}$, are also unique and thus, their visibility patterns. We explore the visibility patterns of other low-periodic time series and also enumerate all elementary blocks of each of their periodic windows. All of these visibility patterns are reflected in the corresponding accumulation points at the onset of chaos, where periodicity is lost.