Numerical Taylor expansions of invariant manifolds in large dynamical systems

In this paper we develop a numerical method for computing higher order local approximations of invariant manifolds, such as stable, unstable or center manifolds near steady states of a dynamical system. The underlying system is assumed to be large in the sense that a large sparse Jacobian at the equilibrium occurs, for which only a linear (black box) solver and a low dimensional invariant subspace is available, but for which methods like the OR-Algorithm are considered to be too expensive. Our method is based on an analysis of the multilinear Sylvester equations for the higher derivatives which can be solved under certain nonresonance conditions. These conditions are weaker than the standard gap conditions on the spectrum which guarantee the existence of the invariant manifold. The final algorithm requires the solution of several large linear systems with a bordered Jacobian. To these systems we apply a block elimination method recently developed by Govaerts and Pryce [12, 14].