A differential equation is stiff when it contains rapidly decaying modes on time scales much shorter than those of interest, forcing an explicit method to take very small steps for stability rather than accuracy.
Here
so the decay rates are and . For a negative real eigenvalue, forward Euler requires
therefore the fast mode imposes
For backward Euler the amplification factors are
whose moduli are at most one for every . Thus
This is the stiff two-mode linear system.