Ghosts in high dimensional non-linear dynamical systems: The example of the hypercycle

Ghost-induced delayed transitions are analyzed in high dimensional non-linear dynamical systems by means of the hypercycle model. The hypercycle is a network of catalytically-coupled self-replicating RNA-like macromolecules, and has been suggested to be involved in the transition from non-living to living matter in the context of earlier prebiotic evolution. It is demonstrated that, in the vicinity of the saddle-node bifurcation for symmetric hypercycles, the persistence time before extinction, Tϵ, tends to infinity as n→∞ (being n the number of units of the hypercycle), thus suggesting that the increase in the number of hypercycle units involves a longer resilient time before extinction because of the ghost. Furthermore, by means of numerical analysis the dynamics of three large hypercycle networks is also studied, focusing in their extinction dynamics associated to the ghosts. Such networks allow to explore the properties of the ghosts living in high dimensional phase space with n=5, n=10 and n=15 dimensions. These hypercyclic networks, in agreement with other works, are shown to exhibit self-maintained oscillations governed by stable limit cycles. The bifurcation scenarios for these hypercycles are analyzed, as well as the effect of the phase space dimensionality in the delayed transition phenomena and in the scaling properties of the ghosts near bifurcation threshold.