Fast phase randomization via two-folds.

A two-fold is a singular point on the discontinuity surface of a piecewise-smooth vector field, at which the vector field is tangent to the discontinuity surface on both sides. If an orbit passes through an invisible two-fold (also known as a Teixeira singularity) before settling to regular periodic motion, then the phase of that motion cannot be determined from initial conditions, and, in the presence of small noise, the asymptotic phase of a large number of sample solutions is highly random. In this paper, we show how the probability distribution of the asymptotic phase depends on the global nonlinear dynamics. We also show how the phase of a smooth oscillator can be randomized by applying a simple discontinuous control law that generates an invisible two-fold. We propose that such a control law can be used to desynchronize a collection of oscillators, and that this manner of phase randomization is fast compared with existing methods (which use fixed points as phase singularities), because there is no slowing of the dynamics near a two-fold.