Local bifurcation structure of a bouncing ball system with a piecewise polynomial function for table displacement.

The system in which a small rigid ball is bouncing repeatedly on a heavy flat table vibrating vertically, so-called the bouncing ball system, has been widely studied. Under the assumption that the table is vibrating with a piecewise polynomial function of time, the bifurcation diagram changes qualitatively depending on the order of the polynomial function. We elucidate the mechanism of the difference in the bifurcation diagrams by focusing on the two-period solution. In addition, we derive the approximate curve of the branch close to the period-doubling bifurcation point in the case of the piecewise cubic function of time for the table vibration. We also performed numerical calculation, and we demonstrate that the approximations well reproduce the numerical results.