Generic Rotating-Frame-Based Approach to Chaos Generation in Nonlinear Micro- and Nanoelectromechanical System Resonators

This Letter provides a low-power method for chaos generation that is generally applicable to nonlinear micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems (MNEMS) resonators. The approach taken is independent of the material, scale, design, and actuation of the device in question; it simply assumes a good quality factor and a Duffing type nonlinearity, features that are commonplace to MNEMS resonators. The approach models the rotating-frame dynamics to analytically constrain the parameter space required for chaos generation. By leveraging these common properties of MNEMS devices, a period-doubling route to chaos is generated using smaller forcing than typically reported in the literature.