The Sliding Bifurcations in Planar Piecewise Smooth Differential Systems

Abstract

In this paper we are mainly interested in the bifurcation phenomena for a class of planar piecewise smooth differential systems, where a new phenomenon, i.e. sliding heteroclinic bifurcation, is found. Furthermore we will show that the involved systems can present many interesting bifurcation phenomena, such as the (sliding) heteroclinic bifurcation, sliding (homoclinic) cycle bifurcation and semistable limit cycle bifurcation and so on. The system can have two hyperbolic limit cycles, which are bifurcated in one way from a semistable limit cycle, and in another way from a heteroclinic cycle and a sliding cycle. In the proof of our main results, we will use the geometric singular perturbation theory to analyze the dynamics near the sliding region.