The term boundary crisis refers to the destruction or creation of a chaotic attractor when parameters vary. The locus of a boundary crisis may contain regions of positive Lebesgue measure marking the transition from regular dynamics to the chaotic regime. This article investigates the dynamics occurring near a heteroclinic cycle involving a hyperbolic equilibrium point E and a hyperbolic periodic solution P, such that the connection from E to P is of codimension one and the connection from P to E occurs at a quadratic tangency (also of codimension one). We study these cycles as organizing centers of two-parameter bifurcation scenarios and, depending on properties of the transition maps, we find different types of shift dynamics that appear near the cycle. Breaking one or both of the connections we further explore the bifurcation diagrams previously begun by other authors. In particular, we identify the region of crisis near the cycle, by giving information on multipulse homoclinic solutions to E and P as well as multipulse heteroclinic tangencies from P to E, and bifurcating periodic solutions, giving partial answers to the problems (Q1)-(Q3) of E. Knobloch (2008), Spatially localised structures in dissipative systems: open problems, Nonlinearity, 21, 45-60. Throughout our analysis, we focus on the case where E has real eigenvalues and P has positive Floquet multipliers.
Comment: Nonlinearity 2017 (accepted)