On the form invariance of phase length distributions of type-I intermittency observed in a low-temperature semiconductor experiment

¹ Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
² Physics Institute, University of Bayreuth - D-95440 Bayreuth, Germany

Received: 30 May 1996
Accepted: 5 November 1996

Abstract

Spontaneous oscillations developing during low-temperature impact ionization breakdown in extrinsic germanium have been shown to obey the characteristic features of the type-I intermittent route to chaos. In this paper we show that the distribution of the laminar phase length remains form invariant under variation of the experimental control parameter, if properly normalized to its variance. This presents the first experimental evidence of a recently proposed critical scaling law for the higher-order moments (Rein et al., Europhys. Lett., 21 (1993) 7).