Morse-Smale systems and topological structure of carrier manifolds (Q2314248)

The paper is a survey of results describing the connection between the global dynamics of Morse-Smale systems on closed manifolds and the topology of the carrier manifolds, including many important results by the authors. In Section 1 the definition of Morse-Smale systems and their basic properties are discussed. Section 2 contains the so-called filtration construction. This construction was introduced by \textit{S. Smale} [Bull. Am. Math. Soc. 66, 43--49 (1960; Zbl 0100.29701)] to obtain the Morse inequalities relating the Betti numbers of the underlying manifold to the dynamical properties of the Morse-Smale system. In Section 3 Morse-Smale systems on one-dimensional and two-dimensional manifolds are discussed. In Section 4 the authors consider Morse-Smale systems without equilibrium states and review classical results about the structure of the underlying manifold. In Section 5 Morse-Smale flows on 3-manifolds such that their nonwandering sets include equilibrium points are considered. The authors provide theorems on the structure of the carrier manifold and existence conditions for periodic trajectories. Section 6 includes the study of the topology of manifolds admitting flows with three equilibrium states. In Section 7 the authors obtain sufficient conditions for the existence of heteroclinic curves and heteroclinic points. In Section 8 it is shown that for any Morse-Smale system there are invariant closed sets such that one of them is the attractor and another one is the repeller. These results are applied in Section 9 to obtain classification results. This clearly written survey, which also contains a very complete list of references, is a very valuable source for those readers interested in the subject.