Reversible bifurcation of homoclinic solutions in presence of an essential spectrum (Q2507578)

This work addresses bifurcations of a class of infinite dimensional reversible dynamical systems in dependence on a parameter \(\epsilon\). The dynamical systems exhibit a family of symmetric equilibria near the origin such that the linearized operators near the origin have essential spectrum occupying the whole real line. In addition it is assumed for the linearized operators that \(0\) is a simple eigenvalue and that there is a pair of imaginary eigenvalues for negative \(\epsilon\) that meet in \(0\) for \(\varepsilon=0\) and disappear for positive \(\varepsilon\). It is shown that this scenario occurs in certain water-wave problems posed in terms of Kirchgässner's ``spatial dynamics'' formulation. Rather general assumptions are given to obtain a family of bifurcating solutions which are homoclinic to every equilibrium solution near the origin and which are approximated at leading order by homoclinic solutions of the Benjamin-Ono equation.