Double-well chimeras in 2D lattice of chaotic bistable elements

•A novel type of chimeras, a double-well chimera, has been firstly found in a 2D discrete lattice.•The new type of chimeras is related to a bistable dynamics of the lattice elements.•Chimera structures have been uncovered for dynamical systems with merging bifurcations. We investigate spatio-temporal dynamics of a 2D ensemble of nonlocally coupled chaotic cubic maps in a bistability regime. In particular, we perform a detailed study on the transition “coherence – incoherence” for varying coupling strength for a fixed interaction radius. For the 2D ensemble we show the appearance of amplitude and phase chimera states previously reported for 1D ensembles of nonlocally coupled chaotic systems. Moreover, we uncover a novel type of chimera state, double-well chimera, which occurs due to the interplay of the bistability of the local dynamics and the 2D ensemble structure. Additionally, we find double-well chimera behavior for steady states which we call double-well chimera death. A distinguishing feature of chimera patterns observed in the lattice is that they mainly combine clusters of different chimera types: phase, amplitude and double-well chimeras.