Codimension 3 nonresonant bifurcations of homoclinic orbits with two inclination flips

Homoclinic bifurcations in four-dimensional vector fields are investigated by setting up a local coordinate near a homoclinic orbit. This homoclinic orbit is principal but its stable and unstable foliations take inclination flip. The existence, nonexistence, and uniqueness of the 1-homoclinic orbit and 1-periodic orbit are studied. The existence of the two-fold 1 -periodic orbit and three-fold 1 -periodic orbit are also obtained. It is indicated that the number of periodic orbits bifurcated from this kind of homoclinic orbits depends heavily on the strength of the inclination flip.     

Conservative homoclinic bifurcations and some applications

We study generic unfoldings of homoclinic tangencies of two-dimensional area-preserving diffeomorphisms (conservative New house phenomena) and show that they give rise to invariant hyperbolic sets of arbitrarily large Hausdorff dimension. As applications, we discuss the size of the stochastic layer of a standard map and the Hausdorff dimension of invariant hyperbolic sets for certain restricted three-body problems. We avoid involved technical details and only concentrate on the ideas of the proof of the presented results.     

Snapback repellers and homoclinic orbits for multi-dimensional maps

Marotto extended Li–Yorke?s theorem on chaos from one-dimension to multi-dimension through introducing the notion of snapback repeller in 1978. Due to a technical flaw, he redefined snapback repeller in 2005 to validate this theorem. This presentation provides two methodologies to facilitate the application of Marotto?s theorem. The first one is to estimate the radius of repelling neighborhood for a repelling fixed point. This estimation is of essential and practical significance as combined with numerical computations of snapback points. Secondly, we propose a sequential graphic-iteration scheme to construct homoclinic orbit for a repeller. This construction allows us to track the homoclinic orbit. Applications of the present methodologies with numerical computation to a chaotic neural network and a predator–prey model are demonstrated.     

Maslov index for homoclinic orbits of Hamiltonian systems

A useful tool for studying nonlinear differential equations is index theory. For symplectic paths on bounded intervals, the index theory has been completely established, which revealed tremendous applications in the study of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. Nevertheless, analogous questions concerning homoclinic orbits are still left open. In this paper we use a geometric approach to set up Maslov index for homoclinic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. On the other hand, a relative Morse index for homoclinic orbits will be derived through Fredholm index theory. It will be shown that these two indices coincide.     

The loop quantities and bifurcations of homoclinic loops

The stability and bifurcations of a homoclinic loop for planar vector fields are closely related to the limit cycles. For a homoclinic loop of a given planar vector field, a sequence of quantities, the homoclinic loop quantities were defined to study the stability and bifurcations of the loop. Among the sequence of the loop quantities, the first nonzero one determines the stability of the homoclinic loop. There are formulas for the first three and the fifth loop quantities. In this paper we will establish the formula for the fourth loop quantity for both the single and double homoclinic loops. As applications, we present examples of planar polynomial vector fields which can have five or twelve limit cycles respectively in the case of a single or double homoclinic loop by using the method of stability-switching.     

Codimension 2 bifurcations of double homoclinic loops

In this work, the double-homoclinic-loop bifurcations in four dimensional vector fields are investigated by setting up local coordinates near the double homoclinic loops. We get the existence, uniqueness and incoexistence of the large 1-hom and large 1-per orbit, and their corresponding existence regions are located. Furthermore, the inexistence of the large 2-hom and large 2-per orbit are also demonstrated.     

Transversal homoclinic orbits for higher dimensional difference equations

In this paper, we use the functional analytic method (theory of exponential dichotomies and Liapunov-Schmidt method) to study the homoclinic bifurcations of higher dimensional difference equations in a degenerate case. We obtain a Melnikov vector mapping for difference equations with the help of which the existence of transversal homoclinic orbits can be detected.     

Existence of nontrivial homoclinic orbits for fourth-order difference equations

We obtain a sufficient condition for the existence of nontrivial homoclinic orbits for fourth-order difference equations by using Mountain Pass Theorem, a weak convergence argument and a discrete version of Lieb’s lemma.     

Multiple homoclinic orbits for a class of Hamiltonian systems

In this paper, we obtain the existence of at least two nontrivial homoclinic orbits for a class of second order autonomous Hamiltonian systems. This multiplicity result is obtained by a new variational method based on the relative category: to overcome the lack of compactness of the problem, we first solve perturbed nonautonomous problems and study the limit of the solutions as the nonautonomous perturbation goes to 0. This method allows to get rid of some assumptions on the potential used in the work of Ambrosetti and Coti-Zelati. Received August 9, 1999 / Accepted September 7, 1999 / Published online September 14, 2000     

Hunting for homoclinic orbits in reversible systems: A shooting technique

A dynamical system is said to be reversible if there is an involution of phase space that reverses the direction of the flow. Examples are Hamiltonian systems with quadratic potential energy. In such systems, homoclinic orbits that are invariant under the reversible transformation are typically not destroyed as a parameter is varied. A strategy is proposed for the direct numerical approximation to paths of such homoclinic orbits, exploiting the special properties of reversible systems. This strategy incorporates continuation using a simplification of known methods and a shooting approach, based on Newton's method, to compute starting solutions for continuation. For Hamiltonian systems, the shooting uses symplectic numerical integration. Strategies are discussed for obtaining initial guesses for the unknown parameters in Newton's method. An example system, for which there is an infinity of symmetric homoclinic orbits, is used to test the numerical techniques. It is illustrated how the orbits can be systematically located and followed. Excellent agreement is found between theory and numerics.This paper is presented as an outcome of the LMS Durham Symposium convened by Professor C.T.H. Baker on 4–14 July 1992 with support from the SERC under grant reference number GR/H03964.     

Existence of even homoclinic orbits for second-order Hamiltonian systems

Some existence theorems for even homoclinic orbits are obtained for a class of second-order nonautonomous Hamiltonian systems with symmetric potentials under a class of new superquadratic conditions. A homoclinic orbit is obtained as a limit of solutions of a certain sequence of nil-boundary-value problems which are obtained by the minimax methods.     

Stability and bifurcations of symmetric periodic orbits

Se un problema Hamiltoniano integrabile non degenere, come si può ottenere dal problema dei due corpi in coordinate rotanti, è perturbato con una funzione potenziale simmetrica rispetto ad un asse, le proprietà di simmetria delle soluzioni consentono di semplificare la ricerca, di orbite periodiche. In tal modo si ottiene un teorema di continuazione delle orbite periodiche che fornisce più informazioni di quello classico. La funzione che descrive la simmetria delle orbite è genericamente una funzione di Morse, e le biforcazioni di orbite periodiche simmetriche possono essere descritte in termini di punti singolari e di valori critici di tale funzione. II problema ristretto dei tre corpi ed il problema del satellite in un potenziale non axisimmetrico sono trattati come esempi. Le stesse biforcazioni possono anche essere descritte come singolarità degeneri della funzione generatrice della trasformazione canonica associata all'applicazione di Poincaré, cioè al trascorrere di un periodo sinodico. In tal modo le proprietà di stabilità lineare delle orbite periodiche, la segnatura dei punti singolari della funzione generatrice e l'andamento qualitativo della funzione di simmetria appaiono correlate tra loro. Ne risulta la possibilità di predire, prima di qualsiasi esperimento numerico, non solo la struttura generica delle biforcazioni delle orbite periodiche simmetriche, ma anche la stabilità di tutte le orbite periodiche coinvolte.     

Transversal homoclinic orbits and chaos for partial functional differential equations

The persistence of degenerate homoclinic orbit is considered for parabolic functional differential equations with small periodic perturbations. Bifurcation functions constructed between two finite-dimensional spaces are obtained. The zeros of the function correspond to the existence of the homoclinic orbit for the perturbed systems. Some applicable conditions are given to ensure that the functions are solvable. Moreover, We show that the homoclinic solution for the perturbed system is transversal and hence the perturbed system exhibits chaos.     

Plateau of α-function and c-minimal homoclinic orbits

We consider the construction of the plateau of the α-function in a hyperbolic and positive definite Lagrangian system, and link the boundries of the α-function's plateau with the distribution of c-minimal homoclinic orbits to Aubry sets.     

Transversal homoclinic orbits and chaos for partial functional differential equations

The persistence of degenerate homoclinic orbit is considered for parabolic functional differential equations with small periodic perturbations. Bifurcation functions constructed between two finite-dimensional spaces are obtained. The zeros of the function correspond to the existence of the homoclinic orbit for the perturbed systems. Some applicable conditions are given to ensure that the functions are solvable. Moreover, We show that the homoclinic solution for the perturbed system is transversal and hence the perturbed system exhibits chaos.