Bifurcations of Heteroclinic Orbits

The search for traveling wave solutions of a semilinear diffusion partial differential equation can be reduced to the search for heteroclinic solutions of the ordinary differential equation ü − cu̇ + f(u) = 0, where c is a positive constant and f is a nonlinear function. A heteroclinic orbit is a solution u(t) such that u(t) → γ ₁ as t → −∞ and u(t) → γ ₂ as t → ∞ where γ ₁, γ ₂ are zeros of f. We study the existence of heteroclinic orbits under various assumptions on the nonlinear function f and their bifurcations as c is varied. Our arguments are geometric in nature and so we make only minimal smoothness assumptions. We only assume that f is continuous and that the equation has a unique solution to the initial value problem. Under these weaker smoothness conditions we reprove the classical result that for large c there is a unique positive heteroclinic orbit from 0 to 1 when f(0) = f(1) = 0 and f(u) > 0 for 0 < u < 1. When there are more zeros of f, there is the possibility of bifurcations of the heteroclinic orbit as c varies. We give a detailed analysis of the bifurcation of the heteroclinic orbits when f is zero at the five points −1 < −θ < 0 < θ < 1 and f is odd. The heteroclinic orbit that tends to 1 as t → ∞ starts at one of the three zeros, −θ, 0, θ as t → −∞. It hops back and forth among these three zeros an infinite number of times in a predictable sequence as c is varied.