Isolating neighborhoods and chaos (Q1901177)

The purpose of this article is to present an algebraic invariant which remains constant under appropriate homotopies and simultaneously provides a minimal description of the complexity of the dynamics of the system. For most applications a nontrivial lower bound on the structure of the dynamics is sufficient. Estimates of this form gives the Conley's theorem on the gradient structure of a flow [\textit{C. C. Conley}, `Isolated invariant sets and the Morse index' (1978; Zbl 0397.34056)]. The work [\textit{C. McCord} and the first author, On the global dynamics of attractors for scalar delay equations, J. Am. Math. Soc. 9, 1095-1133 (1996; Zbl 0861.58023)] contains a technique based on the Conley index theory, which can provide semi-conjugacies onto explicitly given systems which are not necessarily gradient-like. In the present article it is shown that similar techniques can be used to obtain semiconjugacies with subshift dynamics on a specified set of symbols. The authors restrict themselves to the case of discrete dynamical systems. The obtained results are applied to the Hénon map to prove the existence of chaotic dynamics on an open set of parameter values.