Genericity in Network Dynamics

This thesis deals with the investigation of dynamical properties – in particular generic synchrony breaking bifurcations – that are inherent to the structure of a semigroup network as well the numerous algebraic structures that are related to these types of networks. Most notably we investigate the interplay between network dynamics and monoid representation theory as induced by the fundamental network construction in terms of hidden symmetry as introduced by RINK and SANDERS. After providing a brief survey of the field of network dynamics in Part I, we thoroughly introduce the formalism of semigroup networks, the customized dynamical systems theory, and the necessary background from monoid representation theory in Chapters 3 and 4. The remainder of Part II investigates generic synchrony breaking bifurcations and contains three major results. The first is Theorem 5.11, which shows that generic symmetry breaking steady state bifurcations in monoid equivariant dynamics occur along absolutely indecomposable subrepresentations – a natural generalization of the corresponding statement for group equivariant dynamics. Then Theorem 7.12 relates the decomposition of a representation given by a network with high-dimensional internal phase spaces to that induced by the same network with one-dimensional internal phase spaces. This result is used to show that there is a smallest dimension of internal dynamics in which all generic l-parameter bifurcations of a fundamental network can be observed (Theorem 7.24). In Part III, we employ the machinery that was summarized and further developed in Part II to feedforward networks. We propose a general definition of this structural feature of a network and show that it can equivalently be characterized in different algebraic notions in Theorem 8.35. These are then exploited to fully classify the corresponding monoid representation for any feedforward network and to classify generic synchrony breaking steady state bifurcations with one- or highdimensional internal dynamics.