Combinatorial approaches to Hopf bifurcations in systems of interacting elements (Q482267)

The main contribution is the introduction of a new type of labeled digraphs associated to a product of matrices, called DSR\(^{[2]}\) graphs. They reveal to be an important tool for investigating the spectrum of products of real matrices belonging to certain classes. This issue arises in the study of Hopf bifurcations of certain dynamical systems, including systems modeling chemical reactions networks. Since the vector fields of these systems can be written as a product of two matrices, the problems under discussion can be formulated as follows: given a matrix \(A\), does the spectrum of \(AB\) have nonzero pure imaginary eigenvalues, for each matrix \(B\) having the same sign pattern as the transpose \(A^t\)?; or, given a matrix \(A\), does the spectrum of \(AB\) avoid the left or the right complex half-planes for each matrix \(B\) having the same sign pattern as \(A^t\)? Answering these questions is crucial to know if the systems associated to chemical reaction networks admit Hopf bifurcations. Using DSR\(^{[2]}\) graphs, the authors derive some conditions in order to do so. These graphs are compared with the existing DSR graphs and some ideas for further applications are discussed. Several examples are included as well as a helpful background section.