Dynamical Properties of Gaussian Thermostats

In this work we show that the set of Kupka-Smale Gaussian thermostats on a compact manifold is generic. A Gaussian thermostat is Kupka-Smale if the closed orbits are hyperbolic and the heteroclinic intersection are transversal. We also show a dichotomy between robust transitivity and existence of arbitrary number of attractors or repellers orbits. The main tools are the concept of transitions adapted to the conformally symplectic context and a perturbative theorem which is a version of the Franks lemma for Gaussian thermostats. Finally we provide some conditions in terms of geometrical invariants for an invariant set of a Gaussian thermostat to have dominated splitting. From that we conclude some dynamical properties for the surface case

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

Essential hyperbolicity and homoclinic bifurcations: a dichotomy phenomenon/mechanism for diffeomorphisms

We prove that any diffeomorphism of a compact manifold can be approximated in topology C1 by another diffeomorphism exhibiting a homoclinic bifurcation (a homoclinic tangency or a heterodimensional cycle) or by one which is essentially hyperbolic (it has a finite number of transitive hyperbolic attractors with open and dense basin of attraction)

The Evolutionary Robustness of Forgiveness and Cooperation

We study the evolutionary robustness of strategies in infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games in which players make mistakes with a small probability and are patient. The evolutionary process we consider is given by the replicator dynamics. We show that there are strategies with a uniformly large basin of attraction independently of the size of the population. Moreover, we show that those strategies forgive defections and, assuming that they are symmetric, they cooperate

Mildly dissipative diffeomorphisms of the disk with zero entropy

We discuss the dynamics of smooth diffeomorphisms of the disc with vanishing topological entropy which satisfy the mild dissipation property introduced in [CP]. In particular it contains the H\'enon maps with Jacobian up to 1/4. We prove that these systems are either (generalized) Morse Smale or infinitely renormalizable. In particular we prove for this class of diffeomorphisms a conjecture of Tresser: any diffeomorphism in the interface between the sets of systems with zero and positive entropy admits doubling cascades. This generalizes for these surface dynamics a well known consequence of Sharkovskii's theorem for interval maps