| Abstract: | Slowly varying Hamiltonian systems, for which action is a well-known adiabatic invariant, are considered in the case where the system undergoes a saddle center bifurcation. We analyze the situation in which the solution slowly passes through the nonhyperbolic homoclinic orbit created at the saddle-center bifurcation. The solution near this homoclinic orbit consists of a large sequence of homoclinic orbits surrounded by near approaches to the autonomous nonlinear nonhyperbolic saddle point. By matching this solution to the strongly nonlinear oscillations obtained by averaging before and after crossing the homoclinic orbit, we determine the change in the action. If one orbit comes sufficiently close to the nonlinear saddle point, then that one saddle approach instead satisfies the nonautonomous first Painlevé equation, whose stable manifold of the unstable saddle (created in the saddle-center bifurcation) separates solutions approaching the stable center from those involving sequences of nearly homoclinic orbits. |
