Mel'nikov Analysis of Homoclinic Chaos in a Perturbed sine-Gordon Equation

We describe and characterize rigorously the chaotic behavior of the sine-Gordon equation. The existence of invariant manifolds and the persistence of homoclinic orbits for a perturbed sine--Gordon equation are established. We apply a geometric method based on Mel'nikov's analysis to derive conditions for the transversal intersection of invariant manifolds of a hyperbolic point of the perturbed Poincare map.