Structural stability

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In

C1
-small perturbations).

Examples of such qualitative properties are numbers of

smooth manifolds and flows generated by them, and diffeomorphisms
.

Structurally stable systems were introduced by

strange attractor). An important class of structurally stable systems in arbitrary dimensions is given by Anosov diffeomorphisms and flows. During the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Maurício Peixoto and Marília Chaves Peixoto, motivated by the work of Andronov and Pontryagin, developed and proved Peixoto's theorem, the first global characterization of structural stability.[1]

Definition

Let G be an

topologically equivalent on G: there exists a homeomorphism h: G → G which transforms the oriented trajectories of F into the oriented trajectories of F1. If, moreover, for any ε > 0 the homeomorphism h may be chosen to be C0 ε-close to the identity map when F1 belongs to a suitable neighborhood of F depending on ε, then F is called (strongly) structurally stable. These definitions extend in a straightforward way to the case of n-dimensional compact smooth manifolds with boundary. Andronov and Pontryagin originally considered the strong property. Analogous definitions can be given for diffeomorphisms in place of vector fields and flows: in this setting, the homeomorphism h must be a topological conjugacy
.

It is important to note that topological equivalence is realized with a loss of smoothness: the map h cannot, in general, be a diffeomorphism. Moreover, although topological equivalence respects the oriented trajectories, unlike topological conjugacy, it is not time-compatible. Thus, the relevant notion of topological equivalence is a considerable weakening of the naïve C1 conjugacy of vector fields. Without these restrictions, no continuous time system with fixed points or periodic orbits could have been structurally stable. Weakly structurally stable systems form an open set in X1(G), but it is unknown whether the same property holds in the strong case.

Examples

Necessary and sufficient conditions for the structural stability of C1 vector fields on the unit disk D that are transversal to the boundary and on the

homoclinic trajectories, which enormously complicate the dynamics, as discovered by Henri Poincaré
.

Structural stability of non-singular smooth vector fields on the

circle map
.

Hadamard billiards
.

History and significance

Structural stability of the system provides a justification for applying the qualitative theory of dynamical systems to analysis of concrete physical systems. The idea of such qualitative analysis goes back to the work of

George Birkhoff in the 1920s, but was first formalized with introduction of the concept of rough system by Andronov and Pontryagin in 1937. This was immediately applied to analysis of physical systems with oscillations by Andronov, Witt, and Khaikin. The term "structural stability" is due to Solomon Lefschetz, who oversaw translation of their monograph into English. Ideas of structural stability were taken up by Stephen Smale and his school in the 1960s in the context of hyperbolic dynamics. Earlier, Marston Morse and Hassler Whitney initiated and René Thom developed a parallel theory of stability for differentiable maps, which forms a key part of singularity theory. Thom envisaged applications of this theory to biological systems. Both Smale and Thom worked in direct contact with Maurício Peixoto, who developed Peixoto's theorem
in the late 1950s.

When Smale started to develop the theory of hyperbolic dynamical systems, he hoped that structurally stable systems would be "typical". This would have been consistent with the situation in low dimensions: dimension two for flows and dimension one for diffeomorphisms. However, he soon found examples of vector fields on higher-dimensional manifolds that cannot be made structurally stable by an arbitrarily small perturbation (such examples have been later constructed on manifolds of dimension three). This means that in higher dimensions, structurally stable systems are not dense. In addition, a structurally stable system may have transversal homoclinic trajectories of hyperbolic saddle closed orbits and infinitely many periodic orbits, even though the phase space is compact. The closest higher-dimensional analogue of structurally stable systems considered by Andronov and Pontryagin is given by the Morse–Smale systems.

See also

References

  1. ISSN 0036-1445
    .
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