Further Investigation of Hysteresis in Chua's Circuit

For a system to display bistable behavior (or hysteresis), it is well known that there needs to be a nonlinear component and a feedback mechanism. In the Chua circuit, nonlinearity is supplied by the Chua diode (nonlinear resistor) and in the physical medium, feedback would be inherently present, however, with standard computer models this feedback is omitted. Using Poincaré first return maps, bifurcations for a varying parameter in the Chua circuit equations are investigated for both increasing and decreasing parameter values. Evidence for the existence of a small bistable region is shown and numerical methods are applied to determine the behavior of the solutions within this bistable region.