Homoclinic and Heteroclinic Bifurcations Close to a Twisted Heteroclinic Cycle.

We study the interaction of a transcritical (or saddle-node) bifurcation with a codim0 /codim-2 heteroclinic cycle close to (but away from) the local bifurcation point. The study is motivated by numerical observations on the traveling wave ODE of a reactiondiffusion equation. The manifold organization is such that two branches of homoclinic orbits to each fixed point are created when varying the two parameters controlling the codim-2 loop. It is shown that the homoclinic orbits may become degenerate in an orbitflip bifurcation. We establish the occurrence of multi-loop homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits in this system. The double-loop homoclinic orbits are shown to bifurcate in an inclination-flip bifurcation, where a Smale's horseshoe is found. Keywords: heteroclinic cycle; T-point; orbit-flip bifurcation; inclination-flip bifurcation. Running title: Bifurcations near a twisted heteroclinic cycle. 1 Introduction The traveling wave ODE of the FitzHugh-Nagumo reaction-diffusion (RD) e..