Clustering in ensembles of globally coupled identical chaotic oscillators is reconsidered using a twofold approach. Stability of clusters towards “emanation” of the elements is described with the evaporation Lyapunov exponents. It appears that direct numerical simulations of ensembles often lead to spurious clusters that have positive evaporation exponents, due to a numerical trap. We propose a numerical method that surmounts the spurious clustering. We also demonstrate that clustering can be very sensitive to the number of elements in the ensemble.

• Received 2 February 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.044102