Bifurcation mechanisms underlying the nested mixed-mode oscillations in a canard-generating driven Bonhoeffer–van der Pol oscillator

In previous works (Inaba and Kousaka, 2020; Inaba and Tsubone, 2020; Inaba et al, 2022) the bifurcation structures referred to as nested mixed-mode oscillations (MMOs) were discovered; these structures can be generated by a driven slow–fast Bonhoeffer–van der Pol (BVP) oscillator. It is known that this oscillator can generate canards in the absence of perturbations. In this work, we investigate nested MMOs in a canard-generating driven BVP oscillator near a supercritical Hopf bifurcation point subjected to weak periodic perturbations. The analysis of this system is undertaken using the techniques presented by Kawakami, (1984). These techniques include the use of a shooting algorithm to derive the parameters of the forced oscillators at which bifurcations occur by solving the simultaneous equations that identify the conditions in which the solution of the forced oscillators is periodic and the characteristic multiplier(s) with the largest absolute value of the periodic solution on the Poincaré section crosses the unit circle. We also obtain several two-parameter bifurcation diagrams that describe the system investigated here. One motivation for this study is to demonstrate that the bifurcation structures present in nested MMOs are likely to be a widespread phenomenon. We hypothesize here that nested MMOs represent a stable phenomenon; this is likely to be the case because they appear and disappear consistently and are bound by sequential saddle–node and period-doubling bifurcation curves; this hypothesis is supported by the observation that codimension-two bifurcation points or cusps do not appear in the region close to these bifurcation boundaries. •Bonhoeffer–van der Pol (BVP) oscillators exhibit FitzHugh–Nagumo dynamics.•Driven BVP oscillators generate unnested and nested mixed-mode oscillations (MMOs).•This study investigates the bifurcation structures of nested MMOs.•Nested MMOs are bounded by sequential saddle–node and period-doubling bifurcations.•Nested MMOs appear and disappear regularly bounded by these bifurcation curves.