Pulse-adding of temporal dissipative solitons: resonant homoclinic points and the orbit flip of case B with delay

Abstract

Abstract We numerically investigate the branching of temporally localised, two-pulse solutions from one-pulse periodic solutions with non-oscillating tails in delay differential equations (DDEs) with large delay. Solutions of this type are commonly referred to as temporal dissipative solitons (TDSs) (Yanchuk et al 2019 Phys. Rev. Lett. 123 53901) in applications, and we adopt this term here. We show by means of a prototypical example that—analogous to travelling pulses in reaction–diffusion partial differential equations (Yanagida 1987 J. Differ. Equ. 66 243–62)—the branching of two-pulse TDSs from one-pulse TDSs with non-oscillating tails is organised by codimension-two homoclinic bifurcation points of a real saddle equilibrium (Homburg and Sandstede 2010 Handbook of Dynamical Systems Elsevier) in a corresponding profile equation. We consider a generalisation of Sandstede’s model (Sandstede 1997 J. Dyn. Differ. Equ. 9 269–88) (a prototypical model for studying codimension-two homoclinic bifurcation points in ordinary differential equations) with an additional time-shift parameter, and use Auto07p (Doedel 1981 Congr. Numer. 30 265–84; Doedel and Oldeman 2010 AUTO-07P: Continuation and Bifurcation Software for Ordinary Differential Equations Concordia University) and DDE-BIFTOOL (Sieber et al 2014 arXiv:1406.7144) to compute numerically the unfolding of these bifurcation points in the resulting DDE. We then interpret this model as the profile equation for TDSs in a DDE with large delay by exploiting the reappearance of periodic solutions in DDEs (Yanchuk and Perlikowski 2009 Phys. Rev. E 79 046221). In doing so, we identify both the non-orientable resonant homoclinic bifurcation and the orbit flip bifurcation of case B as organising centres for the existence of two-pulse TDSs in the DDE with large delay. We study the bifurcation curves emanating from these codimension-two points beyond a local neighbourhood in parameter space. In this way, we are able to discuss how folds of homoclinic bifurcations in an extended system bound the existence region of TDSs in the DDE with large delay. We also discuss the relation between a reduced multivalued-map (in the limit of infinite delay) and the existence of TDSs.