On Wiener's violent oscillations, Popov's curves, and Hopf's supercritical bifurcation for a scalar heat equation

Abstract

A parameter‐dependent perturbation of the spectrum of the scalar Laplacian is studied for a class of nonlocal and non‐self‐adjoint rank one perturbations. A detailed description of the perturbed spectrum is obtained both for Dirichlet boundary conditions on a bounded interval as well as for the problem on the full real line. The perturbation results are applied to the study of a related parameter‐dependent nonlinear and nonlocal parabolic equation. The equation models a feedback system that admits an interpretation as a thermostat device or in the context of an agent‐based price formation model for a market. The existence and the stability of periodic self‐oscillations of the related nonlinear and nonlocal heat equation that arise from a Hopf bifurcation are proved. The bifurcation and stability results are obtained both for the nonlinear parabolic equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions and for a related problem with nonlinear Neumann boundary conditions that model feedback boundary control. They follow from a Popov criterion for integral equations after reducing the stability analysis for the nonlinear parabolic equation to the study of a related nonlinear Volterra integral equation. While the problem is studied in the scalar case only, it can be extended naturally to arbitrary Euclidean dimension and to manifolds.