Heteroclinic cycles and wreath product symmetries (Q4529166)

The paper studies the existence and stability of heteroclinic cycles arising in local bifurcation of dynamical systems with wreath product symmetry \(\Gamma ={\mathbb{Z}}_2\wr\mathcal G\), where \({\mathbb{Z}}_2\) acts by \(\pm 1\) on \({\mathbb{R}}\) and \(\mathcal G\) is a transitive subgroup of the permutation group \({\mathbb{S}}_N\) (\(N\) is said the `degree' of \(\mathcal G\)). Primary (codimension one) bifurcations from an equilibrium to heteroclinic cycles are considered as real eigenvalues pass through zero. The possibility of heteroclinic cycles is related to the existence of non-gradient equivariant vector fields of cubic order. By using Hilbert series and the software package MAGMA, only five groups \(\mathcal G\) of degree \(N\leq 7\) (apart from the cyclic groups \(\mathcal G\)) are shown to be candidates for the existence of heteroclinic cycles. The existence of certain types of heteroclinic cycles in these cases is established by making use of the concept of a subcycle. A special class of heteroclinic cycles (edge cycles) and a generalization of heteroclinic cycles (heteroclinic web) are discussed. The method of investigation is applied to some examples.