Global bifurcation of homoclinic trajectories of discrete dynamical systems (Q1935648)

The authors state the existence of an unbounded connected branch of nontrivial homoclinic solutions of a family of discrete nonautonomous asymptotically hyperbolic systems parametrized by a circle. The appearance of homoclinic trajectories is translated into a problem of bifurcation of zeros of a parametrized family of \(C^{1}\)-Fredholm maps \(G:S^{1}\times X\rightarrow X,\) where \(X\) is a specific function space. The solution is supposed to connect the stationary branch to infinity through homoclinics of arbitrarily large norm. Next, the authors prove an index theorem for families of linear Fredholm operators, that will be employed in order to show that the twisting of asymptotic bundles forces appearance of homoclinic trajectories. They also show that \(G\) is a continuous family of \(C^{1}\)-Fredholm maps. The Fredholm property is derived from the asymptotic hyperbolicity of the linearization at the stationary solution. The family \(G\) is also proper. Next, the generalized homotopy property is discussed in order to construct a topological degree. This, together with the computation of the index bundle performed before, is used to prove the main result of the paper. Finally, a nontrivial example illustrates the theoretical results.