  Taming chaos arising from dissipative non-autonomous nonlinear systems by
applying additional harmonic excitations is a reliable and widely used
procedure nowadays. But the suppressory effectiveness of generic non-harmonic
periodic excitations continues to be a significant challenge both to our
theoretical understanding and in practical applications. Here we show how the
effectiveness of generic suppressory excitations is optimally enhanced when the
impulse transmitted by them (time integral over two consecutive zeros) is
judiciously controlled in a not obvious way. This is demonstrated
experimentally by means of an analog version of a universal model, and
confirmed numerically by simulations of such a damped driven system including
the presence of noise. Our theoretical analysis shows that the controlling
effect of varying the impulse is due to a correlative variation of the energy
transmitted by the suppressory excitation.
