Computational methods for global analysis of homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits: A case study

In earlier paper we have developed a numerical method for the computation of branches of heteroclinic orbits for a system of autonomous ordinary differential equations in ⁿ . The idea of the method is to reduce a boundary value problem on the real line to a boundary value problem on a finite interval by using linear approximation of the unstable and stable manifolds. In this paper we extend our algorithm to incorporate higher-order approximations of the unstable and stable manifolds. This approximation is especially useful if we want to compute center manifolds accurately. A procedure for switching between the periodic approximation of homoclinic orbits and the higher-order approximation of homoclinic orbits provides additional flexibility to the method. The algorithm is applied to a model problem: the DC Josephson Junction. Computations are done using the software package AUTO.