Nonautonomous systems with transversal homoclinic structures under discretization (Q291909)

Chaotic behavior in nonlinear autonomous ODEs is often associated with homoclinic orbits. Such homoclinic structures, in turn, are characterized by the celebrated Smale-Shil'nikov-Birkhoff Theorem. In this setting, the corresponding stable and unstable manifolds have the entire homoclinic orbit in common. Contrary to this autonomous situation, the stable and unstable integral manifolds (the authors speak of fiber bundles) of nonautonomous ODEs typically intersect transversally in isolated points. In this interesting paper, the authors consider homoclinic orbits of nonautonomous ODEs and study their behavior under one-step discretization. The first part provides a corresponding persistence result and related error estimates. Moreover, an algorithm due to \textit{J. P. England} et al. [SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 3, No. 2, 161--190 (2004; Zbl 1059.37067)] is generalized to nonautonomous systems. Three examples convincingly illustrate the obtained result: An artificial one serves to confirm the error estimates, a periodic one reveals the influence of an underlying autonomous system and the final realistic example comes from mathematical biology.