Bosch Vivancos, Chossat and Melbourne showed that two types of steady-state
bifurcations are possible from trivial states when Euclidean equivariant s
ystems are restricted to a planar lattice-scalar and pseudoscalar-and began
the study of pseudoscalar bifurcations. The scalar bifurcations have been
well studied since they appear in planar reaction-diffusion systems and in
plane layer convection problems. Bressloff, Cowan, Golubitsky, Thomas and W
iener showed that bifurcations in models of the visual cortex naturally con
tain both scalar and pseudoscalar bifurcations, due to a different action o
f the Euclidean group in that application.
In this paper, we review the symmetry discussion in Bressloff et al and we
continue the study of pseudoscalar bifurcations. Our analysis furthers the
study of pseudoscalar bifurcations in three ways.
(a) We complete the classification of axial subgroups on the hexagonal latt
ice in the shortest wavevector case proving the existence of one new planfo
rm-a solution with triangular D-3 symmetry.
(b) We derive bifurcation diagrams for generic bifurcations giving, in part
icular, the stability of solutions to perturbations in the hexagonal lattic
e. For the simplest (codimension zero) bifurcations, these bifurcation diag
rams are identical to those derived by Golubitsky, Swift and Knobloch in th
e case of Benard convection when there is a midplane reflection-though the
details in the analysis are more complicated.
(c) We discuss the types of secondary states that can appear in codimension
-one bifurcations tone parameter in addition to the bifurcation parameter),
which include time periodic states from roll and hexagon solutions and dri
fting solutions from triangles (though the drifting solutions are always un
stable near codimension-one bifurcations). The essential difference between
scalar and pseudoscalar bifurcations appears in this discussion.