Colliding dissipative pulses—The shooting manifold

Abstract We study multi-pulse solutions in excitable media. Under the assumption that a single pulse is asymptotically stable, we show that there is a well-defined “shooting manifold,” consisting of two pulses traveling towards each other. In phase space, the two-dimensional manifold is a graph over the manifold of linear superpositions of two pulses located at x 1 and x 2 , with x 1 − x 2 ≫ 1 . It is locally invariant under the dynamics of the reaction–diffusion system and uniformly asymptotically attracting with asymptotic phase. The main difficulty in the proof is the fact that the linearization at the leading order approximation is strongly non-autonomous since pulses approach each other with speed of order one.