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Abstract

Transient chaos in spatially extended systems can be characterized by the length of the transient phase, which typically grows quickly with the system size (supertransients). For a large class of these systems, the chaotic phase terminates abruptly, without any obvious precursors in commonly used observables. Here we investigate transient spatiotemporal chaos in two different models of this class. By probing the state space using perturbed trajectories we show the existence of a "terminal transient phase," which occurs prior to the abrupt collapse of chaotic dynamics. During this phase the impact of perturbations is significantly different from the earlier transient and particular patterns of (non) susceptible regions in state space occur close to the chaotic trajectories. We therefore hypothesize that even without perturbations proper precursors for the collapse of chaotic transients exist, which might be highly relevant for coping with spatiotemporal chaos in cardiac arrhythmias or brain functionality, for example.