Strange nonchaotic attractor

A strange nonchaotic attractor combines geometrically irregular attraction with no positive Lyapunov exponent for the dynamics under consideration. Systems driven at two incommensurate frequencies supplied the original examples.^[ref]

One useful framework is a skew productThe base is an irrational rotation of the circle. An attracting invariant graph of a skew product obeys $h(\theta +\omega )=F_{\theta }(h(\theta ))$; the geometric question concerns how irregular that graph is. For a differentiable one-dimensional fiber map, the fiber Lyapunov exponent along it is, when the limit exists,A negative value describes average contraction of perturbations within the fiber. The base rotation has a neutral exponent, so a negative fiber exponent does not mean that every exponent of the full forced system is negative. Under appropriate boundedness and integrability assumptions for this triangular derivative system, the full largest exponent is zero rather than positive.

These equations specify a framework, not a claim that every choice of $F_{\theta }$ produces a strange attractor. For instance, $F_{\theta }(x)=ax$ with $|a|<1$ has the smooth attracting graph $h=0$. A negative fiber exponent alone therefore establishes neither geometric strangeness nor a discontinuous graph.