The third type of chaos in a system of two adaptively coupled phase oscillators

We study a new type of attractor, the so-called reversible core, which is a mathematical image of mixed dynamics, in a strongly dissipative time-irreversible system of two adaptively coupled phase oscillators. The existence of mixed dynamics in this system was proved in our previous article [A. A. Emelianova and V. I. Nekorkin, Chaos 29, 111102 (2019)]. In this paper, we attempt to identify the dynamic mechanisms underlying the existence of mixed dynamics. We give the region of the existence of mixed dynamics on the parameter plane and demonstrate in what way, when a type of attractor changes, its main characteristics, such as its fractal dimension and the sum of Lyapunov exponents, transform. We demonstrate that when mixed dynamics appear in the system, the average frequencies of the oscillations in forward and reverse time begin to almost coincide, and its spectra gradually approach each other with an increase in the parameter responsible for the presence of mixed dynamics.