The Ghosts of Departed Quantities in Switches and Transitions

Transitions between steady dynamical regimes in diverse applications are often modelled using discontinuities, but doing so introduces problems of uniqueness. No matter how quickly a transition occurs, its inner workings can affect the dynamics of the system significantly. Here we discuss the way transitions can be reduced to discontinuities without trivializing them, by preserving so-called hidden terms. We review the fundamental methodology, its motivations, and where their study seems to be heading. We derive a prototype for piecewise-smooth models from the asymptotics of systems with rapid transitions, sharpening Filippov’s convex combinations by encoding the tails of asymptotic series into nonlinear dependence on a switching parameter. We present a few examples that illustrate the impact of these on our standard picture of smooth or only piecewise-smooth dynamics.