Chaos was first suspected in the weather patterns that govern our lives, but there are many other examples. It is easy to make simple electronic circuits that are chaotic. Mechanical systems on such wildly different scales as laboratory pendula and orbiting planets have been shown to exhibit chaos. Laser emissions can fluctuate chaotically. The human heart shows evidence of beating to chaotic rhythms.
Chemical reactions oscillate in chaotic fashion.
Chaos and nonlinearity are phenomena that scientists and engineers had tried to avoid in the past. However, recently, a need to control and exploit these behaviors has emerged. This has occurred in a variety of fields from medicine to lasers, optics, communication systems, materials processing, and signal processing. The Nonlinear Dynamics Group at West Virginia University is interdisciplinary, with the closest interactions involving the physics, chemistry, and mathematics departments. Graduate students in physics may choose any of the faculty listed below for their research advisor.