Potential flux landscapes determine the global stability of a Lorenz chaotic attractor under intrinsic fluctuations.

We developed a potential flux landscape theory to investigate the dynamics and the global stability of a chemical Lorenz chaotic strange attractor under intrinsic fluctuations. Landscape was uncovered to have a butterfly shape. For chaotic systems, both landscape and probabilistic flux are crucial to the dynamics of chaotic oscillations. Landscape attracts the system down to the chaotic attractor, while flux drives the coherent motions along the chaotic attractors. Barrier heights from the landscape topography provide a quantitative measure for the robustness of chaotic attractor. We also found that the entropy production rate and phase coherence increase as the molecular numbers increase. Power spectrum analysis of autocorrelation function provides another way to quantify the global stability of chaotic attractor. We further found that limit cycle requires more flux and energy to sustain than the chaotic strange attractor. Finally, by detailed analysis we found that the curl probabilistic flux may provide the origin of the chaotic attractor.