Umbilical torus bifurcations in Hamiltonian systems

We consider perturbations of integrable Hamiltonian systems in the neighbourhood of normally umbilic invariant tori. These lower dimensional tori do not satisfy the usual non-degeneracy conditions that would yield persistence by an adaption of KAM theory, and there are indeed regions in parameter space with no surviving torus. We assume appropriate transversality conditions to hold so that the tori in the unperturbed system bifurcate according to a (generalised) umbilical catastrophe. Combining techniques of KAM theory and singularity theory we show that such bifurcation scenarios of invariant tori survive the perturbation on large Cantor sets. Applications to gyrostat dynamics are pointed out.

Modeling the dynamics of glacial cycles

This article is concerned with the dynamics of glacial cycles observed in the geological record of the Pleistocene Epoch. It focuses on a conceptual model proposed by Maasch and Saltzman [J. Geophys. Res.,95, D2 (1990), pp. 1955-1963], which is based on physical arguments and emphasizes the role of atmospheric CO2 in the generation and persistence of periodic orbits (limit cycles). The model consists of three ordinary differential equations with four parameters for the anomalies of the total global ice mass, the atmospheric CO2 concentration, and the volume of the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). In this article, it is shown that a simplified two-dimensional symmetric version displays many of the essential features of the full model, including equilibrium states, limit cycles, their basic bifurcations, and a Bogdanov-Takens point that serves as an organizing center for the local and global dynamics. Also, symmetry breaking splits the Bogdanov-Takens point into two, with different local dynamics in their neighborhoods