Dissonant points and the region of influence of non-saddle sets (Q2297260)

{Invariant sets} play a key role in the understanding of the global and asymptotic behaviors of a given flow, either in finite or infinite dimension. Such sets have been the object of study of several researchers for many decades. Among these sets, the {saddles} represent a widely studied class, mainly because of their robustness under perturbations. In this paper, however, the authors explore the properties of {non-saddle sets}, which are equally important, since they frequently appear in flows defined in locally compact metric spaces, but are not in general robust under perturbation. First, a detailed study of topological properties of non-saddle sets is carried out in Section 2. In particular, in Proposition 7, the authors present sufficient topological conditions for a non-saddle continuum of a flow on a locally compact metric space to be either an attractor or a repeller. Such result provides a description of the topological structure of a class of non-saddle sets in the torus (Theorem 8). Also, by introducing the concept of {strong influence} (Definition 10), they are able the characterize the notion of non-saddleness in Proposition 11. In Section 3 they present results on the structure of flows in locally compact metric spaces that possess non-saddle sets. A crucial concept in the description of such structure is the one of {dissonant points} (see Definition 15), that leads to a dynamical characterization of homoclinic points in Proposition 16. The authors also present a result (Theorem 24) that shows that non-saddle sets with dissonant points happen very often in connected closed oriented \(n\)-dimensional (\(n>1\)) smooth manifolds with non-trivial first cohomology group. Furthermore, they show that when the first cohomology group is trivial, the situation is different, and all connected isolated non-saddle sets have no dissonant points. Furthermore, they present a result relating the non-saddleness property with the Conley index (Theorem 27), and one describing the general structure of flows in compact ANR with a non-saddle set (Theorem 29). In Section 4, they explore dynamical properties of non-saddle sets of flows defined in \(2\)-dimensional manifolds (see Theorem 35). Finally, the issue of robustness is dealt with in Section 5. The authors prove (in Theorem 39) that dynamically robustness is equivalent to topological robustness (see Definitions 37 and 38) for a differentiable parametrized family of flows on a closed connected orientable differentiable manifold with trivial first cohomology group.