Butterfly effect in a chemical oscillator

The strong sensitivity of aperiodic dynamics to initial conditions is one of the fingerprinting features of chaotic systems. While this dependence can be directly verified by means of numerical approaches, it is quite elusive and difficult to be isolated in real experimental systems. In this paper, we discuss a didactic and self-consistent method to show the divergent behaviour between two infinitesimally different solutions of the famous Belousov–Zhabotinsky oscillator simultaneously undergoing a transition to a chaotic regime. Experimental data are also used to give an intuitive visualization of the essential meaning of a Lyapunov exponent, which allows for a more quantitative characterization of the chaotic transient.