Homoclinic twist bifurcation in a system of two coupled oscillators

We analyse the dynamics of two identical Josephson junctions coupled through a purely capacitive load in the neighborhood of a degenerate symmetric homoclinic orbit. A bifurcation function is obtained applying Lin's version of the Lyapunov–Schmidt reduction. We locate in parameter space the region of existence of n-periodic orbits, and we prove the existence of n-homoclinic orbits and bounded nonperiodic orbits. A singular limit of the bifurcation function yields a one-dimensional mapping which is analyzed. Numerical computations of nonsymmetric homoclinic orbits have been performed, and we show the relevance of these computations by comparing the results with the analysis.