Homoclinic solutions in mechanical systems with small dissipation. Application to DNA dynamics

 This paper analyzes the problem of persistence of homoclinic solutions to perturbed systems of second order ODE's. These systems arise from PDE's, when considering solutions in the form of travelling waves. It is shown that homoclinic solutions persist in the presence of dissipation. Dissipation can be balanced by nonautonomous terms of compact support, which are controlled by a single parameter. This result is applied to prove the existence of torsional pulse-like travelling waves propagating along a nonelastic DNA molecule. In this case the energy is added to system by advancing the RNA polymerase. Received: 17 August 2000 / Revised version: 26 October 2001 / Published online: 14 March 2002