Journal of Statistical Physics, Vol. 54, Nos. 3/4, 1989. p. 925-948.
A new type of crisis is shown to exist in a broad class of systems (including the Lorenz model) which leads to an anomalous band splitting or to a symmetry-breaking bifurcation of the strange attractor, depending on the actual values of the control parameters. A piecewise linear model is used to understand the mechanism of this crisis and to obtain exact results.