The discontinuous matching of two globally asymptotically stable crossing piecewise smooth systems in the plane do not produce in general a piecewise differential system globally asymptotically stable (Q6188403)

Let \(Z\) be a planar (smooth or piecewise smooth) vector field. We say that \(Z\) is globally asymptotically stable (GAS) if \(Z\) has a unique singularity at the origin and if every orbit of \(Z\) converges to the origin in forward time. Let \(Z=(X,Y;\Sigma)\) be a planar piecewise smooth vector field satisfying the following statements. \begin{itemize} \item \(X\) and \(Y\) are GAS; \item \(\Sigma\) is a straight line containing the origin (in particular, containing the unique singularity of \(X\) and \(Y\)); \item Except by the origin, every point of \(\Sigma\) is of crossing type (also known as sewing type). \end{itemize} The main result of the paper is that there is \(Z=(X,Y;\Sigma)\) satisfying the above conditions and such that \(Z\) is not GAS. In the proof of the main result, \(X\) and \(Y\) are polynomial, quadratic and with a stable hyperbolic focus at the origin. Nevertheless, \(Z\) has a unstable hyperbolic limit cycle. Therefore, it is valuable to note that the sewing of two stable focus can result in a unstable limit cycle and thus in orbits spiraling to the infinity.