Recently, we have investigated a new chaotic system of three-dimensional autonomous quadratic ordinary differential equations, and found that the system visually displays a four-scroll chaotic attractor confirmed by both numerical simulations and circuit implementation. In this paper, we further study the following question: Is it really true that this system can generate a four-scroll chaotic attractor, or is it only a numerical artifact? By a more careful theoretical analysis along with some further numerical simulations, we conclude that the four-scroll chaotic attractor of this system, which we observed on both computer and oscilloscope, cannot actually exist in theory. The fact is that this system has two co-existing two-scroll chaotic attractors that are arbitrarily close in the phase space for some system parameters, therefore extremely tiny numerical round-off errors or signal fluctuations will nudge the system orbit to switch from one attractor to another, thereby forming the seemingly single four-scroll chaotic attractor on screen display.
A New Three-Dimensional Chaotic System with Constant Exponent Spectrum: Analysis, Synchronization and Circuit Implementation