Extended normal forms for one-dimensional border-collision bifurcations

Abstract

The border-collision normal form describes the local dynamics in continuous systems with switches when a fixed point intersects a switching surface. For one-dimensional cases where the bifurcation creates or destroys only fixed points and period-two orbits, we show that the standard local equivalence of normal forms, topological conjugacy, can be replaced by differentiable conjugacy provided an extra term is added to the normal form. In these cases topological conjugacy is so weak that a range of values can be used for the coefficients in the normal form. The extension to differentiable conjugacy explains why the usual choice of slopes in the standard normal form is privileged. This highlights the importance of differentiable conjugacies and the need for extended normal forms.