Spatio-temporal symmetries and bifurcations via bi-orthogonal decompositions

Summary A tool for analyzing spatio-temporal complex physical phenomena was recently proposed by the authors, Aubry et al. 5]. This tool consists in decomposing a spatially and temporally evolving signal into orthogonal temporal modes (temporal “structures”) and orthogonal spatial modes (spatial “structures”) which are coupled. This allows the introduction of a temporal configuration space and a spatial one which are related to each other by an isomorphism. In this paper, we show how such a tool can be used to analyze space-time bifurcations, that is, qualitative changes in both space and time as a parameter varies. The Hopf bifurcation and various spatio-temporal symmetry related bifurcations, such as bifurcations to traveling waves, are studied in detail. In particular, it is shown that symmetry-breaking bifurcations can be detected by analyzing the temporal and spatial eigenspaces of the decomposition which then lose their degeneracy, namely their invariance under the symmetry. Furthermore, we show how an extension of the theory to “quasi-symmetries” permits the treatment of nondegenerate signals and leads to an exponentially decreasing law of the energy spectrum. Examples extracted from numerically obtained solutions of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, a coupled map lattice, and fully developed turbulence are given to illustrate the theory.