Spiral chaos in the nonholonomic model of a Chaplygin top
The authors study numerically the chaotic dynamics of a dynamically asymmetric unbalanced ball rolling on a plane (Chaplygin top). They first briefly review some results on spiral attractors (also known as Shilnikov or Rösler attractors) and discuss the equations of motion of a Chaplygin top. Then they briefly recall some results from previous works of the authors about the transition to chaos via torus doubling bifurcations. The main part of the paper of the article is concerned with providing concrete numerical evidence for the existence of homoclinic strange attractors of discrete spiral type.
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