Fractal Analysis of Canard Cycles and Slow-fast Hopf Points in Piecewise Smooth Liénard Equations

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to give a complete fractal analysis of piecewise smooth (PWS) slow-fast Liénard equations. For the analysis, we use the notion of Minkowski dimension of one-dimensional orbits generated by slow relation functions. More precisely, we find all possible values for the Minkowski dimension near PWS slow-fast Hopf points and near bounded balanced crossing canard cycles. We study fractal properties of the unbounded canard cycles using PWS classical Liénard equations. We also show how the trivial Minkowski dimension implies the non-existence of limit cycles of crossing type close to Hopf points. This is not true for crossing limit cycles produced by bounded balanced canard cycles, i.e. we find a system undergoing a saddle-node bifurcation of crossing limit cycles and a system without limit cycles (in both cases, the Minkowski dimension is trivial). We also connect the Minkowski dimension with upper bounds for the number of limit cycles produced by bounded canard cycles.