Singular Perturbations, Transversality, and Sil'nikov Saddle-Focus Homoclinic Orbits

We consider the singularly perturbed system $dot x$ =εf(x,y,ε,λ), $dot y$ =g(x,y,ε,λ). We assume that for small (ε,λ), (0,0) is a hyperbolic equilibrium on the normally hyperbolic centre manifold y=0 and that y ₀(t) is a homoclinic solution of $dot y$ =g(0,y,0,0). Under an additional condition, we show that there is a curve in the (ε,λ) parameter space on which the perturbed system has a homoclinic orbit also. We investigate the transversality properties of this orbit and use our results to give examples of 4 dimensional systems with Sil'nikov saddle-focus homoclinic orbits.