Grazing-sliding bifurcations, border collision maps and the curse of dimensionality for piecewise smooth bifurcation theory

Abstract. We show that maps describing border collision bifurcations (continuous but non-differentiable discrete time maps) are subject to a curse of dimensionality: it is impossible to reduce the study of the general case to low dimensions, since in every dimension the bifurcation can produce fundamentally different attractors (contrary to the case of local bifurcations in smooth systems). In particular we show that ndimensional border collision bifurcations can have invariant sets of dimension k for integer k from 0 to n. We also show that the border collision normal form is related to grazing-sliding bifurcations of switching dynamical systems. This implies that the dynamics of these two apparently distinct bifurcations (one for discrete time dynamics, the other for continuous time dynamics) are closely related and hence that a similar curse of dimensionality holds in grazing-sliding bifurcations.