Homoclinic trajectories in discontinuous systems (Q925218)

The paper concerns the study of bifurcations of bounded solutions from homoclinic orbits for time-perturbed discontinuous systems. In previous papers, 2-dimensional time-perturbed discontinuous differential equations have been investigated by a geometric approach. Here, the authors deal with higher dimensional systems by means of an analytical approach based on the implicit function theorem to construct a Melnikov like function, whose simple zeros correspond to homoclinic orbits of the perturbed equation. Further, an illustrative example of a periodically perturbed piecewise linear 3-dimensional differential equation is presented.