The duration of pulses generated by such lasers is comparable with the period of natural oscillations of single molecules which allows easier manipulation by single molecules and nanodimensional systems and offers new possibilities for chemistry, nanotechnologies and quantum computing. Progress in this area was stimulated by the invention of the femtosecond lasers at the end of the 1980s. Note that the ideas and methods of cybernetics (control, estimation, identification, etc.) were in many cases reopened and rediscovered.Īnother area where control and estimation problems play an important role is that of quantum control.

has more than 4000 citations, while the paper by Pecora and Carroll has more than 6000 citations. In 2016, after a quarter of century the paper by Ott et al. Both papers were published in physical journals and just in a few years the number of the papers published in physical journals in this area was counted in hundreds. Similarly, a possibility of synchronizing two nonlinear systems with chaotic behaviour discovered in the paper by Pecora & Carroll initiated numerous publications discovering more and more cases and methods for synchronizing chaotically moving systems of various origin. This discovery triggered an avalanche of publications aimed at the investigation of such possibilities for different physical (and not only physical) systems. One source of such a demand was the discovery by Ott et al. of a possibility to transform a chaotic trajectory into a periodic one by means of a properly chosen controlling action. Then the main areas are briefly outlined: control of oscillations and chaos (§ 4), controlled synchronization (§ 5), control in thermodynamics (§ 6), control of networks (§ 7), quantum control (§ 8).Ī real demand for control algorithms actually emerged in physics in the early 1990s.

The main goal of this paper is to outline the main research directions during the last decade and introduce the other papers of this theme issue.Īfter exposing a brief history of cybernetical physics (§ 2), its methodology (models, algorithms and results) is introduced in § 3. Since then cyberphysical research has been actively developing and numerous publications have appeared.

A panoramic view of this new area was presented in the survey paper and in the book published by Springer in 2007 . The term was coined in 1999 to name an emerging research area on the borderland between physics and control.

And cybernetical means are assumed to include, in addition to control, such areas as estimation, filtering, optimization, identification, information theory, pattern recognition and other related areas born within cybernetics in the middle of the twenty-first century. The paper may be of interest for a rather broad audience as it provides a guide across this emerging interdisciplinary field.Ĭybernetical physics is understood as the science of studying physical systems by cybernetical means. In this introductory paper, the development of the area during the last decade is outlined. Cybernetical physics is the area on the borderland between physics and control studying possibilities of changing properties of the physical systems by means of control, particularly by means of feedback. Feedback may have a tremendous impact on the behaviour of physical systems, reveal new effects and phenomena, provide tools for optimal planning of physical experiments and even create models of complex physical systems.

Chaos control infinity