Snaking bifurcations of localized patterns on ring lattices

Abstract

We study the structure of stationary patterns in bistable lattice dynamical systems posed on rings with a symmetric coupling structure in the regime of small coupling strength. We show that sparse coupling (for instance, nearest-neighbour or next-nearest-neighbour coupling) and all-to-all coupling lead to significantly different solution branches. In particular, sparse coupling leads to snaking branches with many saddle-node bifurcations, whilst all-to-all coupling leads to branches with six saddle nodes, regardless of the size of the number of nodes in the graph.