Novikov-Morse theory for dynamical systems (Q1404462)

The purpose of the authors is to extend the Morse-Novikov theory for critical points of closed 1-forms on smooth manifolds to flows on compact polyhedra much in the same way as Conley's theory extends the ordinary Morse theory to flows. Here closed one forms are substituted with continuous 1-cocycles. The authors introduce the notion of a flow carrying a cocycle. Roughly speaking, a flow carries a cocycle \(\alpha\) with respect to an isolated invariant set with finitely many components if the restriction to any component is a coboundary and outside of an isolating neighborhood \(\int_{\gamma},\alpha\) is uniformly bounded from below on each trajectory \(\gamma\) whose maximal domain is a bounded interval and goes uniformly to infinity on trajectories with unbounded domains. With this definition in hand they use Morse decompositions adapted to covering projections and the approach to Novikov inequalities developped by Faber in order to relate in the usual way the Poincaré polynomial of the Conley index to the Poincaré polynomial of the space derived from homology with coefficients in a presheaf associated to the cocycle. For Morse-Smale flows carrying \(\alpha\) i.e., when the invariant set consists only in hyperbolic fixed points and hyperbolic periodic orbits, this gives bounds from below in terms of the Novikov number of \(\alpha\) for the total number of fixed points of index \(k\) plus the number of periodic orbits of index \(k\) and \(k+1.\) The presentation is far from being user friendly.