No Arabic abstract
We develop a general stability theory for equilibrium points of Poisson dynamical systems and relative equilibria of Hamiltonian systems with symmetries, including several generalisations of the Energy-Casimir and Energy-Momentum methods. Using a topological generalisation of Lyapunovs result that an extremal critical point of a conserved quantity is stable, we show that a Poisson equilibrium is stable if it is an isolated point in the intersection of a level set of a conserved function with a subset of the phase space that is related to the non-Hausdorff nature of the symplectic leaf space at that point. This criterion is applied to generalise the Energy-Momentum method to Hamiltonian systems which are invariant under non-compact symmetry groups for which the coadjoint orbit space is not Hausdorff. We also show that a $G$-stable relative equilibrium satisfies the stronger condition of being $A$-stable, where $A$ is a specific group-theoretically defined subset of $G$ which contains the momentum isotropy subgroup of the relative equilibrium.
We describe the linear and nonlinear stability and instability of certain symmetric configurations of point vortices on the sphere forming relative equilibria. These configurations consist of one or two rings, and a ring with one or two polar vortices. Such configurations have dihedral symmetry, and the symmetry is used to block diagonalize the relevant matrices, to distinguish the subspaces on which their eigenvalues need to be calculated, and also to describe the bifurcations that occur as eigenvalues pass through zero.
For the Newtonian (gravitational) $n$-body problem in the Euclidean $d$-dimensional space, $dge 2$, the simplest possible periodic solutions are provided by circular relative equilibria, (RE) for short, namely solutions in which each body rigidly rotates about the center of mass and the configuration of the whole system is constant in time and central (or, more generally, balanced) configuration. For $dle 3$, the only possible (RE) are planar, but in dimension four it is possible to get truly four dimensional (RE). A classical problem in celestial mechanics aims at relating the (in-)stability properties of a (RE) to the index properties of the central (or, more generally, balanced) configuration generating it. In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions that imply the spectral instability of planar and non-planar (RE) in $mathbb R^4$ generated by a central configuration, thus answering some of the questions raised in cite[Page 63]{Moe14}. As a corollary, we retrieve a classical result of Hu and Sun cite{HS09} on the linear instability of planar (RE) whose generating central configuration is non-degenerate and has odd Morse index, and fix a gap in the statement of cite[Theorem 1]{BJP14} about the spectral instability of planar (RE) whose (possibly degenerate) generating central configuration has odd Morse index. The key ingredients are a new formula of independent interest that allows to compute the spectral flow of a path of symmetric matrices having degenerate starting point, and a symplectic decomposition of the phase space of the linearized Hamiltonian system along a given (RE) which is inspired by Meyer and Schmidts planar decomposition cite{MS05} and which allows us to rule out the uninteresting part of the dynamics corresponding to the translational and (partially) to the rotational symmetry of the problem.
Dynamical system models of complex biochemical reaction networks are usually high-dimensional, nonlinear, and contain many unknown parameters. In some cases the reaction network structure dictates that positive equilibria must be unique for all values of the parameters in the model. In other cases multiple equilibria exist if and only if special relationships between these parameters are satisfied. We describe methods based on homotopy invariance of degree which allow us to determine the number of equilibria for complex biochemical reaction networks and how this number depends on parameters in the model.
The leading-order approximation to a Filippov system $f$ about a generic boundary equilibrium $x^*$ is a system $F$ that is affine one side of the boundary and constant on the other side. We prove $x^*$ is exponentially stable for $f$ if and only if it is exponentially stable for $F$ when the constant component of $F$ is not tangent to the boundary. We then show exponential stability and asymptotic stability are in fact equivalent for $F$. We also show exponential stability is preserved under small perturbations to the pieces of $F$. Such results are well known for homogeneous systems. To prove the results here additional techniques are required because the two components of $F$ have different degrees of homogeneity. The primary function of the results is to reduce the problem of the stability of $x^*$ from the general Filippov system $f$ to the simpler system $F$. Yet in general this problem remains difficult. We provide a four-dimensional example of $F$ for which orbits appear to converge to $x^*$ in a chaotic fashion. By utilising the presence of both homogeneity and sliding motion the dynamics of $F$ can in this case be reduced to the combination of a one-dimensional return map and a scalar function.
In this paper we investigate equilibria of continuous differential equation models of network dynamics. The motivation comes from gene regulatory networks where each directed edge represents either down- or up-regulation, and is modeled by a sigmoidal nonlinear function. We show that the existence and stability of equilibria of a sigmoidal system is determined by a combinatorial analysis of the limiting switching system with piece-wise constant non-linearities. In addition, we describe a local decomposition of a switching system into a product of simpler cyclic feedback systems, where the cycles in each decomposition correspond to a particular subset of network loops.