Controlling spatiotemporal chaos via small external forces

The spatiotemporal chaos in the system described by a one-dimensional nonlinear drift-wave equation is controlled by directly adding a periodic force with appropriately chosen frequencies. By dividing the solution of the system into a carrier steady wave and its perturbation, we find that the controlling mechanism can be explained by a slaving principle. The critical controlling time for a perturbation mode increases exponentially with its wave number.