Journal of Statistical Physics, Vol. 96, Nos. 5/6, 1999. p. 915-962.
Systems of strongly coupled chaotic maps generically exhibit collective behavior emerging out of extensive chaos. We show how the well-known renormalization group (RG) of unimodal maps can be extended to the coupled systems, and in particular to coupled map lattices (CMLs) with local diffusive coupling. The RG relation derived for CMLs is nonperturbative, i.e., not restricted to a particular class of configurations nor to some vanishingly small region of parameter space. After defining the strong-coupling limit in which the RG applies to almost all asymptotic solutions, we first present the simple case of coupled tent maps. We then turn to the general case of unimodal maps coupled by diffusive coupling operators satisfying basic properties, extending the formal approach developed by Collet and Eckmann for single maps. We finally discuss and illustrate the general consequences of the RG: CMLs are shown to share universal properties in the space-continuous limit which emerges naturally as the group is iterated. We prove that the scaling properly ties of the local map carry to the coupled systems, with an additional scaling factor of length scales implied by the synchronous updating of these dynamical systems. This explains various scaling laws and self-similar features previously observed numerically.