Title Information
Title
Fast Pulses with Oscillatory Tails in the FitzHugh-Nagumo System
Name: Personal
Name Part
Carter, Paul A
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2016
Physical Description
Extent
xvi, 338 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
Name: Personal
Name Part
Sandstede, Bjorn
Role
Role Term: Text
Director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Holmer, Justin
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Strauss, Walter
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Mathematics
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Genre (aat)
theses
Abstract
The FitzHugh-Nagumo equations are known to admit fast traveling pulses that have monotone tails and arise as the concatenation of Nagumo fronts and backs in an appropriate singular limit, where a parameter $\epsilon$ goes to zero. These pulses are known to be nonlinearly stable with respect to the underlying PDE. Numerical studies indicate that the FitzHugh-Nagumo system exhibits stable traveling pulses with oscillatory tails. In this work, the existence and stability of such pulses is proved analytically in the singular perturbation limit near parameter values where the FitzHugh-Nagumo system exhibits folds. The existence proof utilizes geometric blow-up techniques combined with the exchange lemma: the main challenge is to understand the passage near two fold points on the slow manifold where normal hyperbolicity fails. For the stability result, similar to the case of monotone tails, stability is decided by the location of a nontrivial eigenvalue near the origin of the PDE linearization about the traveling pulse. We prove that this real eigenvalue is always negative. However, the expression that governs the sign of this eigenvalue for oscillatory pulses differs from that for monotone pulses, and we show indeed that the nontrivial eigenvalue in the monotone case scales with $\epsilon$, while the relevant scaling in the oscillatory case is $\epsilon^{2/3}$. Finally a mechanism is proposed that explains the transition from single to double pulses that was observed in earlier numerical studies, and this transition is constructed analytically using geometric singular perturbation theory and blow-up techniques.
Subject
Topic
dynamical systems
Subject
Topic
partial differential equations
Subject
Topic
singular perturbation theory
Subject
Topic
traveling waves
Subject
Topic
FitzHugh-Nagumo
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/900295")
Topic
Dynamics
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/893484")
Topic
Differential equations, Partial
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20160629
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Language Term: Text
English
Identifier: DOI
10.7301/Z0707ZVP
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations