Homoclinic Bifurcations for the Henon Map

Chaotic dynamics can be effectively studied by continuation from an anti-integrable limit. We use this limit to assign global symbols to orbits and use continuation from the limit to study their bifurcations. We find a bound on the parameter range for which the Henon map exhibits a complete binary horseshoe as well as a subshift of finite type. We classify homoclinic bifurcations, and study those for the area preserving case in detail. Simple forcing relations between homoclinic orbits are established. We show that a symmetry of the map gives rise to constraints on certain sequences of homoclinic bifurcations. Our numerical studies also identify the bifurcations that bound intervals on which the topological entropy is apparently constant.Comment: To appear in PhysicaD: 43 Pages, 14 figure

Topological Chaos in a Three-Dimensional Spherical Fluid Vortex

In chaotic deterministic systems, seemingly stochastic behavior is generated by relatively simple, though hidden, organizing rules and structures. Prominent among the tools used to characterize this complexity in 1D and 2D systems are techniques which exploit the topology of dynamically invariant structures. However, the path to extending many such topological techniques to three dimensions is filled with roadblocks that prevent their application to a wider variety of physical systems. Here, we overcome these roadblocks and successfully analyze a realistic model of 3D fluid advection, by extending the homotopic lobe dynamics (HLD) technique, previously developed for 2D area-preserving dynamics, to 3D volume-preserving dynamics. We start with numerically-generated finite-time chaotic-scattering data for particles entrained in a spherical fluid vortex, and use this data to build a symbolic representation of the dynamics. We then use this symbolic representation to explain and predict the self-similar fractal structure of the scattering data, to compute bounds on the topological entropy, a fundamental measure of mixing, and to discover two different mixing mechanisms, which stretch 2D material surfaces and 1D material curves in distinct ways.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

A lower bound for topological entropy of generic non Anosov symplectic diffeomorphisms

We prove that a $C^1-$generic symplectic diffeomorphism is either Anosov or the topological entropy is bounded from below by the supremum over the smallest positive Lyapunov exponent of the periodic points. We also prove that $C^1-$generic symplectic diffeomorphisms outside the Anosov ones do not admit symbolic extension and finally we give examples of volume preserving diffeomorphisms which are not point of upper semicontinuity of entropy function in $C^1-$topology

Robust Transitivity in Hamiltonian Dynamics

A goal of this work is to study the dynamics in the complement of KAM tori with focus on non-local robust transitivity. We introduce $C^r$ open sets ($r=1, 2, ..., \infty$) of symplectic diffeomorphisms and Hamiltonian systems, exhibiting "large" robustly transitive sets. We show that the $C^\infty$ closure of such open sets contains a variety of systems, including so-called a priori unstable integrable systems. In addition, the existence of ergodic measures with large support is obtained for all those systems. A main ingredient of the proof is a combination of studying minimal dynamics of symplectic iterated function systems and a new tool in Hamiltonian dynamics which we call symplectic blender.Comment: 52 pages, 3 figure