Observing a codimension-two heteroclinic bifurcation

This paper reports experimental observations of codimension-two heteroclinic bifurcations in an autonomous third-order electrical circuit. The paper also reports confirmations by computer simulations. In the laboratory experiments, a pair of programmable resistors are used in order to adjust two bifurcation parameters. In the associated two-parameter space, several codimension-one bifurcation sets are experimentally measured to capture codimension-two bifurcation structures. All of these bifurcation sets are numerically confirmed by exact bifurcation equations which are derived from piecewise-linear circuit dynamics.