The purpose of this paper is to advance the knowledge of the dynamics arising from the creation and subsequent bifurcation of Poincaré heteroclinic cycles. The problem is central to dynamics: it has to be addressed if, for instance, one aims at describing the typical orbit behaviour of a typical system, thus providing a global scenario for the ensemble of dynamical systems - see the Introduction and [P1, P2]. Here, we shall consider smooth, i.e. $C^\infty$, one-parameter families of dissipative, meaning non-conservative, surface diffeomorphisms. An hetereoclinic cycle may appear when the parameter evolves and an orbit of tangency, say quadratic, is created between stable and unstable manifolds (lines) of periodic orbits that belong to a basic hyperbolic set. The key novelty is to allow this basic set, a horseshoe, to have Hausdorff dimension bigger than one. In the present paper we do assume such a dimension to be beyond one, but in a limited way, as explicitly indicated in the Introduction. [A mild non-degeneracy condition on the family of maps is assumed: at the orbit of tangency the invariant lines, stable and unstable, cross each other with positive relative speed]. We then prove that most diffeomorphisms, corresponding to parameter values near the bifurcating one, are non-uniformly hyperbolic in a neighborhood of the horseshoe and the orbit of tangency; such diffeomorphisms display no attractors nor repellors in such a neighborhood. A first precise formulation of our main theorem is at the Introduction and a more encompassing version at the end of the paper. These results were announced in [PY3].
We show that the stable and unstable sets of non-uniformly hyperbolic horseshoes arising in some heteroclinic bifurcations of surface diffeomorphisms have the value conjectured in a previous work by the second and third authors of the present paper. Our results apply to first heteroclinic bifurcations associated to horseshoes with Hausdorff dimension $<22/21$ of conservative surface diffeomorphisms.
We present a comprehensive mechanism for the emergence of rotational horseshoes and strange attractors in a class of two-parameter families of periodically-perturbed differential equations defining a flow on a three-dimensional manifold. When both parameters are zero, its flow exhibits an attracting heteroclinic network associated to two periodic solutions. After slightly increasing both parameters, while keeping a two-dimensional connection unaltered, we focus our attention in the case where the two-dimensional invariant manifolds of the periodic solutions do not intersect. We prove a wide ra…
We study some global aspects of the bifurcation of an equivariant family of volume-contracting vector fields on the three-dimensional sphere. When part of the symmetry is broken, the vector fields exhibit Bykov cycles. Close to the symmetry, we investigate the mechanism of the emergence of heteroclinic tangencies coexisting with transverse connections. We find persistent suspended horseshoes accompanied by attracting periodic trajectories with long periods.
This article is an expanded version of some notes for my talk at the ``Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems Workshop'' (from March 22 to March 25, 2012) held at the Department of Mathematics of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the aforementioned talk, it was discussed some recent results on the fractal geometry of certain objects -- \emph{non-uniformly hyperbolic horseshoes} -- constructed by Jacob Palis and Jean-Christophe Yoccoz in their recent \emph{tour-de-force} work around \emph{heteroclinic bifurcations of surface diffeomorphisms}. The goal of the present article is t…
Heteroclinic cycles involving two saddle-foci, where the saddle-foci share both invariant manifolds, occur persistently in some symmetric differential equations on the 3-dimensional sphere. We analyse the dynamics around this type of cycle in the case when trajectories near the two equilibria turn in the same direction around a 1-dimensional connection - the saddle-foci have the same chirality. When part of the symmetry is broken, the 2-dimensional invariant manifolds intersect transversely creating a heteroclinic network of Bykov cycles. We show that the proximity of symmetry creates heterocl…
A 3D nonlinear chaotic system, called the T system, is analyzed in this paper. Horseshoe chaos is investigated via the heteroclinic Shilnikov method constructing a heteroclinic connections between the saddle equilibrium points of the system. Partially numerical computations are carried out to support the analytical results.
We consider a one-parameter family $(f_λ)_{λ\, \geqslant \, 0}$ of symmetric vector fields on the three-dimensional sphere $\mathbb{S}^3\subset\mathbb{R}^4$ whose flows exhibit a heteroclinic network between two saddle-foci inside a global attracting set. More precisely, when $λ= 0$, there is an attracting heteroclinic cycle between the two equilibria which is made of two $1$-dimensional connections together with a $2$-dimensional sphere which is both the stable manifold of one saddle-focus and the unstable manifold of the other. After slightly increasing the parameter while keeping the $1$-di…
There are few explicit examples in the literature of vector fields exhibiting complex dynamics that may be proved analytically. We construct explicitly a {two parameter family of vector fields} on the three-dimensional sphere $\EU^3$, whose flow has a spiralling attractor containing the following: two hyperbolic equilibria, heteroclinic trajectories connecting them {transversely} and a non-trivial hyperbolic, invariant and transitive set. The spiralling set unfolds a heteroclinic network between two symmetric saddle-foci and contains a sequence of topological horseshoes semiconjugate to full s…
Multi-shooting parameterization methods for invariant manifolds and heteroclinics of 2 DOF Hamiltonian Poincaré maps, with applications to celestial resonant dynamics
In this paper we study a type of two singular point singular cycle where one heteroclinic orbit is the transversal intersection of the 2-dimensional stable manifold of one singular point and the 2-dimensional unstable manifold of other singular point. We show that this kind of singular cycle can give rise to a new mechanism of creation of chaos in 3-dimensional vector fields.
We show that there is a mildly nonlinear three-dimensional system of ordinary differential equations - realizable by a rather simple electronic circuit - capable of producing a generalized attracting horseshoe map. A system specifically designed to have a Poincaré section yielding the desired map is described, but not pursued due to its complexity, which makes the construction of a circuit realization exceedingly difficult. Instead, the generalized attracting horseshoe and its trapping region is obtained by using a carefully chosen Poincaré map of the Rössler attractor. Novel numerical techniq…
We consider three-dimensional diffeomorphisms having simultaneously heterodimensional cycles and heterodimensional tangencies associated to saddle-foci. These cycles lead to a completely nondominated bifurcation setting. For every $r\geqslant 2$, we exhibit a class of such diffeomorphisms whose heterodimensional cycles can be $C^r$ stabilised and (simultaneously) approximated by diffeomorphisms with $C^r$ robust homoclinic tangencies. The complexity of our nondominated setting with plenty of homoclinic and heteroclinic intersections is used to overcome the difficulty of performing $C^r$ pertur…
A new geometric criterion is derived for the existence of chaos in continuous-time autonomous systems in three-dimensional Euclidean spaces, where a type of Smale horseshoe in a subshift of finite type exists, but the intersection of stable and unstable manifolds of two points on a hyperbolic periodic orbit does not imply the existence of a Smale horseshoe of the same type on cross-sections of these two points. This criterion is based on the existence of a hyperbolic periodic orbit, differing from the classical equilibrium-based Shilnikov criterion and the condition of transversal homoclinic o…
For a class of flows on polytopes, including many examples from Evolutionary Game Theory, we describe a piecewise linear model which encapsulates the asymptotic dynamics along the heteroclinic network formed out of the polytope's vertexes and edges. This piecewise linear flow is easy to compute even in higher dimensions, which allows the usage of numeric algorithms to find invariant dynamical structures such as periodic, homoclinic or heteroclinic orbits, which if robust persist as invariant dynamical structures of the original flow. We apply this method to prove the existence of chaotic behav…
In this paper, we explore the three-dimensional chaotic set near a homoclinic cycle to a hyperbolic bifocus at which the vector field has negative divergence. If the invariant manifolds of the bifocus satisfy a non-degeneracy condition, a sequence of hyperbolic suspended horseshoes arises near the cycle, with one expanding and two contracting directions. We extend previous results on the field and we show that the first return map to a given cross section may be approximated by a map exhibiting heteroclinic tangencies associated to two periodic orbits. When the cycle is broken, under an additi…
We prove the saturation of a generalized partially hyperbolic attractor of a $C^2$ map. As a consequence, we show that any generalized partially hyperbolic horseshoe-like attractor of a $C^1$-generic diffeomorphism has zero volume. In contrast, by modification of Poincaré cross section of the geometric model, we build a $C^1$-diffeomorphism with a partially hyperbolic horseshoe-like attractor of positive volume.
In this paper we prove the existence of multiple periodic solutions (harmonic and subharmonic) for a class of planar Hamiltonian systems which include the case of the second order scalar ODE $x'' + a(t)g(x) = 0$ with $g$ satisfying a one-sided condition of sublinear type. We consider the classical approach based on the Poincaré-Birkhoff fixed point theorem as well as some refinements on the side of the theory of bend-twist maps and topological horseshoes. The case of complex dynamics is investigated, too.
For flows, the singular cycles connecting saddle periodic orbit and saddle equilibrium can poten- tially result in the so-called singular horseshoe, which means the existence of a non-uniformly hyperbolic chaotic invariant set. However, it is very hard to find a specific dynamical system that exhibits such singular cycles in general. In this paper, the existence of the singular cycles involved in saddle periodic orbits is studied by two types of piecewise affine systems: one is the piecewise affine system having an admissible saddle point with only real eigenvalues and an admissible saddle per…
This paper presents a mechanism for the coexistence of hyperbolic and non-hyperbolic dynamics arising in a neighbourhood of a conservative Bykov cycle where trajectories turn in opposite directions near the two saddle-foci. We show that {within the class of divergence-free vector fields that preserve the cycle,} tangencies of the invariant manifolds of two hyperbolic saddle-foci densely occur. The global dynamics is persistently dominated by heteroclinic tangencies and by the existence of infinitely many elliptic points coexisting with suspended hyperbolic horseshoes. A generalized version of …
It is known that the famous Feigenbaum-Coullet-Tresser period doubling universality has a counterpart for area-preserving maps of ${\fR}^2$. A renormalization approach has been used in \cite{EKW1} and \cite{EKW2} in a computer-assisted proof of existence of a "universal" area-preserving map $F_*$ -- a map with orbits of all binary periods $2^k, k \in \fN$. In this paper, we consider maps in some neighbourhood of $F_*$ and study their dynamics. We first demonstrate that the map $F_*$ admits a "bi-infinite heteroclinic tangle": a sequence of periodic points $\{z_k\}$, $k \in \fZ$, |z_k| \converg…
We study a homoclinic flip bifurcation of case~\textbf{C}, where a homoclinic orbit to a saddle equilibrium with real eigenvalues changes from being orientable to nonorientable. This bifurcation is of codimension two, and it is the lowest codimension for a homoclinic bifurcation of a real saddle to generate chaotic behavior in the form of (suspended) Smale horseshoes and strange attractors. We present a detailed numerical case study of how global stable and unstable manifolds of the saddle equilibrium and of bifurcating periodic orbits interact close to such bifurcation. This is a step forward…
A heterodimensional cycle consists of a pair of heteroclinic connections between two saddle periodic orbits with unstable manifolds of different dimensions. Recent theoretical work on chaotic dynamics beyond the uniformly hyperbolic setting has shown that heterodimensional cycles may occur robustly in diffeomorphisms of dimension at least three. We study a concrete example of a heterodimensional cycle in the continuous-time setting, specifically in a four-dimensional vector field model of intracellular calcium dynamics. By employing advanced numerical techniques, Zhang, Krauskopf and Kirk [Dis…
