Switching in heteroclinic networks

We study the dynamics near heteroclinic networks for which all eigenvalues of the linearization at the equilibria are real. A common connection and an assumption on the geometry of its incoming and outgoing directions exclude even the weakest forms of switching (i.e. along this connection). The form of the global transition maps, and thus the type of the heteroclinic cycle, plays a crucial role in this. We look at two examples in $\mathbb{R}^5$, the House and Bowtie networks, to illustrate complex dynamics that may occur when either of these conditions is broken. For the House network, there is switching along the common connection, while for the Bowtie network we find switching along a cycle

Almost complete and equable heteroclinic networks

Heteroclinic connections are trajectories that link invariant sets for an autonomous dynamical flow: these connections can robustly form networks between equilibria, for systems with flow-invariant spaces. In this paper we examine the relation between the heteroclinic network as a flow-invariant set and directed graphs of possible connections between nodes. We consider realizations of a large class of transitive digraphs as robust heteroclinic networks and show that although robust realizations are typically not complete (i.e. not all unstable manifolds of nodes are part of the network), they can be almost complete (i.e. complete up to a set of zero measure within the unstable manifold) and equable (i.e. all sets of connections from a node have the same dimension). We show there are almost complete and equable realizations that can be closed by adding a number of extra nodes and connections. We discuss some examples and describe a sense in which an equable almost complete network embedding is an optimal description of stochastically perturbed motion on the network

Heteroclinic Dynamics of Localized Frequency Synchrony: Stability of Heteroclinic Cycles and Networks

In the first part of this paper, we showed that three coupled populations of identical phase oscillators give rise to heteroclinic cycles between invariant sets where populations show distinct frequencies. Here, we now give explicit stability results for these heteroclinic cycles for populations consisting of two oscillators each. In systems with four coupled phase oscillator populations, different heteroclinic cycles can form a heteroclinic network. While such networks cannot be asymptotically stable, the local attraction properties of each cycle in the network can be quantified by stability indices. We calculate these stability indices in terms of the coupling parameters between oscillator populations. Hence, our results elucidate how oscillator coupling influences sequential transitions along a heteroclinic network where individual oscillator populations switch sequentially between a high and a low frequency regime; such dynamics appear relevant for the functionality of neural oscillators

Flow organization and heat transfer in turbulent wall sheared thermal convection

We perform direct numerical simulations of wall sheared Rayleigh-B\'enard (RB) convection for Rayleigh numbers up to $Ra=10^8$, Prandtl number unity, and wall shear Reynolds numbers up to $Re_w=10000$. Using the Monin-Obukhov length $L_{MO}$ we identify three different flow states, a buoyancy dominated regime ($L_{MO} \lesssim \lambda_{\theta}$; with $\lambda_{\theta}$ the thermal boundary layer thickness), a transitional regime ($0.5H \gtrsim L_{MO} \gtrsim \lambda_{\theta}$; with $H$ the height of the domain), and a shear dominated regime ($L_{MO} \gtrsim 0.5H$). In the buoyancy dominated regime the flow dynamics are similar to that of turbulent thermal convection. The transitional regime is characterized by rolls that are increasingly elongated with increasing shear. The flow in the shear dominated regime consists of very large-scale meandering rolls, similar to the ones found in conventional Couette flow. As a consequence of these different flow regimes, for fixed $Ra$ and with increasing shear, the heat transfer first decreases, due to the breakup of the thermal rolls, and then increases at the beginning of the shear dominated regime. For $L_{MO} \gtrsim 0.5H$ the Nusselt number $Nu$ effectively scales as $Nu \sim Ra^{\alpha}$, with $\alpha \ll 1/3$ while we find $\alpha \simeq 0.31$ in the buoyancy dominated regime. In the transitional regime the effective scaling exponent is $\alpha > 1/3$, but the temperature and velocity profiles in this regime are not logarithmic yet, thus indicating transient dynamics and not the ultimate regime of thermal convection

Arbitrarily large heteroclinic networks in fixed low-dimensional state space

We consider heteroclinic networks between $n \in \mathbb{N}$ nodes where the only connections are those linking each node to its two subsequent neighbouring ones. Using a construction method where all nodes are placed in a single one-dimensional space and the connections lie in coordinate planes, we show that it is possible to robustly realise these networks in $\mathbb{R}^6$ for any number of nodes $n$ using a polynomial vector field. This bound on the space dimension (while the number of nodes in the network goes to $\infty$) is a novel phenomenon and a step towards more efficient realisation methods for given connection structures in terms of the required number of space dimensions. We briefly discuss some stability properties of the generated heteroclinic objects