Paper detail

Scaling laws for large numbers of coexisting attracting periodic solutions in the border-collision normal form

A wide variety of intricate dynamics may be created at border-collision bifurcations of piecewise-smooth maps, where a fixed point collides with a surface at which the map is nonsmooth. For the border-collision normal form in two dimensions, a codimension-three scenario was described in previous work at which the map has a saddle-type periodic solution and an infinite sequence of stable periodic solutions that limit to a homoclinic orbit of the saddle-type solution. This paper introduces an alternate scenario of the same map at which there is an infinite sequence of stable periodic solutions due to the presence of a repeated unit eigenvalue in the linearization of some iterate of the map. It is shown that this scenario is codimension-four and that the sequence of periodic solutions is unbounded, aligning with eigenvectors corresponding to the unit eigenvalue. Arbitrarily many attracting periodic solutions coexist near either scenario. It is shown that if $K$ denotes the number of attracting periodic solutions, and $\varepsilon$ denotes the distance in parameter space from one of the two scenarios, then in the codimension-three case $\varepsilon$ scales with $λ^{-K}$, where $λ> 1$ denotes the unstable stability multiplier associated with the saddle-type periodic solution, and in the codimension-four case $\varepsilon$ scales with $K^{-2}$. Since $K^{-2}$ decays significantly slower than $λ^{-K}$, large numbers of attracting periodic solutions coexist in open regions of parameter space extending substantially further from the codimension-four scenarios than the codimension-three scenarios.