Regularization of chaos by noise in electrically driven nanowire systems

The electrically driven nanowire systems are of great importance to nanoscience and engineering. Due to strong nonlinearity, chaos can arise, but in many applications it is desirable to suppress chaos. The intrinsically high-dimensional nature of the system prevents application of the conventional method of controlling chaos. Remarkably, we find that the phenomenon of coherence resonance, which has been well documented but for low-dimensional chaotic systems, can occur in the nanowire system that mathematically is described by two coupled nonlinear partial differential equations, subject to periodic driving and noise. Especially, we find that, when the nanowire is in either the weakly chaotic or the extensively chaotic regime, an optimal level of noise can significantly enhance the regularity of the oscillations. This result is robust because it holds regardless of whether noise is white or colored, and of whether the stochastic drivings in the two independent directions transverse to the nanowire are correlated or independent of each other. Noise can thus regularize chaotic oscillations through the mechanism of coherence resonance in the nanowire system. More generally, we posit that noise can provide a practical way to harness chaos in nanoscale systems.