A Mechanism for Stabilization of Dynamics in Nonlinear Systems with Different Time Scales

Abstract

There are many natural, physical, and biological systems that exhibit multiple time scales. For example, the dynamics of a population of ticks can be described in continuous time during their individual life cycle yet discrete time is used to describe the generation of offspring. These characteristics cause the population levels to be reset periodically. A similar phenomenon can be observed in a sociological college drinking model in which the population is reset by the incoming class each year, as described in the 2006 work of Camacho et al. With the latter as our motivation we analytically and numerically investigate the mechanism by which solutions in certain systems with this resetting conditions stabilize. We further utilize the sociological college drinking model as an analogue to analyze certain one-dimensional and two-dimensional nonlinear systems, as we attempt to generalize our results to higher dimensions.