Two typical steady-state bifurcations for time-reversible vector field families (Q5935820)

The goal is to study bifurcation of equilibria near a fixed point of a parametrized family of time-reversible systems when (i) the reversing symmetry fixes (\(k\)) more directions than it reverses; (ii) the linearization at the equilibrium has a pair of simple eigenvalues either real or purely imaginary which coalesce at zero for a critical value of the parameter; (iii) At the critical value of the parameter out (ii), the linearization at the equilibrium restricted to the generalized eigenspace, \(E_{1}^0\), corresponding to the double eigenvalue zero of (ii) is non-semisimple. Under certain non-degeneracy conditions it is shown, by a standard Lyapunov Schmidt reduction, that either a non-time symmetric pitchfork or time symmetric transcritical bifurcation occurs. More precisely, denoting by \(\varepsilon\) the parameter, by \(E_{0}^{\varepsilon}\) the (\(k\)-dimensional) null-space corresponding to the eigenvalue zero due to (i), and by \(E_{1}^{\varepsilon}\) the \(2\)-dimensional generalized eigenspace corresponding to the (non-zero) pair of simple eigenvalues of (ii), one has that when the parameter crosses the critical value there are two additional zero eigenvalues corresponding to \(E_1^0\) which give rise to either a pair of non-time symmetric equilibria bifurcating from the equilibrium or a time-symmetric transcritical bifurcation. This is according to the two possible forms for the restriction of the linearization at the equilibrium to \(E_{1}^{\varepsilon}\). The result also applies when spatial symmetries add degeneracy to the problem generating multiple eigenvalues. In the last section the results are applied to a class of time-reversible \(n\)-body problems where the velocity field consists of the sum of identical two-body interactions.