Stability of attractors formed by inertial particles in open chaotic flows

The inertial particles with finite mass and size advected in open chaotic flows, which form stable attractors, were investigated. A prototype flow system consisting of a cylinder in a two-dimensional incompressible flow, behind which the von Kármán vortex street forms. It was observed that attractors formed by inertial particles behind the cylinder were fragile in that they can be destroyed by small, additive noise. The results show that the chaotic transient can be superpersistent in the sense that its lifetime obeys an exponential-like scaling law with the noise amplitude.