- We propose a new approach to calculate recurrence plots of multivariate time series, based on joint recurrences in phase space. This new method allows to estimate dynamical invariants of the whole system, like the joint Renyi entropy of second order. We use this entropy measure to quantitatively study in detail the phase synchronization of two bidirectionally coupled chaotic systems and identify different types of transitions to chaotic phase synchronization in dependence on the coupling strength and the frequency mismatch. By means of this analysis we find several new phenomena, such a chaos-period-chaos transition to phase synchronization for rather large coupling strengths. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
