Transitions from phase-locked dynamics to chaos in a piecewise-linear map

Recent work has shown that torus formation in piecewise-smooth maps can take place through a special type of border-collision bifurcation in which a pair of complex conjugate multipliers for a stable cycle abruptly jump out of the unit circle. Transitions from an ergodic to a resonant torus take place via border-collision fold bifurcations. We examine the transition to chaos through torus destruction in such maps. Considering a piecewise-linear normal-form map we show that this transition, by virtue of the interplay of border-collision bifurcations with period-doubling and homoclinic bifurcations, can involve mechanisms that differ qualitatively from those described by Afraimovich and Shilnikov.