Stalling chaos control accelerates convergence

Since chaos control has found its way into many applications, the development of fast, easy-to-implement and universally applicable chaos control methods is of crucial importance. Predictive feedback control has been widely applied but suffers from a speed limit imposed by highly unstable periodic orbits. We show that this limit can be overcome by stalling the control, thereby taking advantage of the stable directions of the uncontrolled chaotic map. This analytical finding is confirmed by numerical simulations, giving a chaos-control method that is capable of successfully stabilizing periodic orbits of high period. 6 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. New Journal of Physics 15 (2013) 063038 1367-2630/13/063038+10$33.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft