Remarks on interacting Neimark–Sacker bifurcations

Abstract

We study codimension-2 bifurcations of fixed points of dissipative diffeomorphisms with a pair of complex eigenvalues together with either an eigenvalue − 1 or another such a pair. In the previous studies only cubic normal forms were considered. However, in some cases the unfolding requires higher-order terms and these are investigated here. We (re)derive the normal forms and reduce them to a single amplitude map. This map is similar to the amplitude system for the double-Hopf bifurcation of vector fields. We show how the critical normal form coefficients determine the general bifurcation picture for this amplitude map. Representative nonsymmetric perturbations of the normal forms are studied numerically. Our case studies show a detailed picture near various bifurcation curves, which is richer than known theoretical predictions. For arbitrary maps with these bifurcations we give explicit formulas for critical normal form coefficients on center manifolds. We apply them to an example from robotics where we are able to demonstrate the existence of a bubble-structure, which was only observed in perturbed normal forms before.