Arnol$'$d Tongues Arising from a Grazing-Sliding Bifurcation

Abstract

The Nei˘mark–Sacker bifurcation, or Hopf bifurcation for maps, is a well-known bifurcation for smooth dynamical systems. At this bifurcation a periodic orbit loses stability, and, except at certain “strong” resonances, an invariant torus is born. The dynamics on the torus is organized by Arnol$'$d tongues in parameter space; inside the Arnol$'$d tongues phase-locked periodic orbits exist that disappear in saddle-node bifurcations on the tongue boundaries, and outside the tongues the dynamics on the torus is quasi-periodic. In this paper we investigate whether a piecewise-smooth system with sliding regions may exhibit an equivalent of the Nei˘mark–Sacker bifurcation. The vector field defining such a system changes from one region in phase space to the next, and the dividing (or switching) surface contains a sliding region if the vector fields on both sides point toward the switching surface. We consider the grazing-sliding bifurcation at which a periodic orbit becomes tangent to the sliding region and prov...