Wave Selection at an $O(2)$-Hopf Bifurcation in Conservative Two-Component PDE Systems

Abstract

At an $O(2)$-equivariant Hopf bifurcation a spatially periodic system selects between traveling waves and standing waves, and which branch appears and whether it is stable is decided by two cubic normal form coefficients. Obtaining these coefficients for a given PDE has required a derivation carried out afresh for each model. We remove that step for two-component systems with conservative polynomial differential nonlinearities on a one-dimensional periodic domain, deriving closed form formulas for both coefficients. They are expressed directly in terms of the array of nonlinear PDE coefficients and the spectral data of the linearization, its critical eigenvectors, adjoint eigenvectors, and non-critical resolvents. We give verifiable conditions under which the underlying center manifold reduction is valid: a structural condition on the principal part of the linearization that yields the required resolvent estimate, and a condition on the Fourier symbol that we show is equivalent to the required spectral gap. In contrast to the model specific computations available previously, the resulting formulas apply to any system in the class without further derivation. A companion implementation evaluates the two normal form coefficients from the coefficient array and verifies the assumptions for a given system. We specialize the formulas to two applications: a strain-gradient regularization of the nonlinear $p$-system, whose quadratic case contains a previously studied model as a special case, and a first order conservative bilinear family, not previously analyzed, in which every bifurcation scenario allowed by the general classification is realized.