Phase-locking phenomena and excitation of damped and driven nonlinear oscillators

Resonant phase-locking phenomena ('autoresonance') in the van der Pol Duffing oscillator forced by a small amplitude periodic driving with slowly varying frequency have been studied. We show that autoresonance occurs for oscillators with sufficiently small damping, when the system may have bi-stable states. We find the range of parameters of the oscillator, the thresholds and the appropriate control paths where autoresonant excitation of high amplitude oscillations is possible.