 Weak-damping heteroclinic splitting of a tilted quartic oscillator

For the imperfect soft Duffing-van der Pol oscillator at positive small $\lambda$ and $|\epsilon |\ll \sqrt{\lambda }$, the symmetric connection of the Hamiltonian system is $v=\sqrt{\lambda }\tanh (\sqrt{\lambda /2}t)$. Its damping integral is $4{\lambda }^{3/2}(\kappa -\lambda /5)/(3\sqrt{2})$. The two saddle equilibrium barrier heights differ by $-4\epsilon {\lambda }^{3/2}/3$ to first order. Equating the energy change to this difference gives the two oppositely directed connection curves in the display. These are weak-damping asymptotic curves, not exact global formulas at order-one parameters.

// Destination: astrophysical-fluid-dynamics.bigb