The Period adding and incrementing bifurcations: from rotation theory to applications

TL;DR

This survey explores bifurcations in piecewise-smooth maps, focusing on period adding and incrementing scenarios, with applications in various fields like control, electronics, and neuroscience.

Contribution

It synthesizes existing results on bifurcation scenarios in circle and interval maps, providing conditions and applications for period adding and incrementing bifurcations.

Findings

Conditions for period adding bifurcations derived from circle map theory.

Conditions for period incrementing bifurcations based on interval map results.

Applications demonstrated in control, power electronics, and neuroscience.

Abstract

This survey article is concerned with the study of bifurcations of piecewise-smooth maps. We review the literature in circle maps and quasi-contractions and provide paths through this literature to prove sufficient conditions for the occurrence of two types of bifurcation scenarios involving rich dynamics. The first scenario consists of the appearance of periodic orbits whose symbolic sequences and "rotation" numbers follow a Farey tree structure; the periods of the periodic orbits are given by consecutive addition. This is called the {\em period adding} bifurcation, and its proof relies on results for maps on the circle. In the second scenario, symbolic sequences are obtained by consecutive attachment of a given symbolic block and the periods of periodic orbits are incremented by a constant term. It is called the {\em period incrementing} bifurcation, in its proof relies on results for maps on the interval. We also discuss the expanding cases, as some of the partial results found in the literature also hold when these maps lose contractiveness. The higher dimensional case is also discussed by means of {\em quasi-contractions}. We also provide applied examples in control theory, power electronics and neuroscience where these results can be applied to obtain precise descriptions of their dynamics.