Dynamics of traveling pulses in heterogeneous media of jump type (Q2467090)

The authors study the dynamics of traveling pulses in one-dimensional media with a spatial heterogeneity. Close to a singularity of codimension 2, consisting of drift and saddle-node instabilities, the PDE dynamics is reduced to the system on the center manifold. The reduced system displays all three types of behaviour, which can be observed for the original PDE equation: penetration, splitting and rebound. The authors also indicate, that the form of the reduced system is rather independent of the model system and is valid for a quite general class of heterogeneities, such as single jumps and pumps, but also periodic and even random cases.