Attractors and orbit-flip homoclinic orbits for star flows (Q2839362)

The author is concerned with a problem connected to the Palis conjecture, namely the study of the abundance of dynamical systems with finitely many attractors.NEWLINENEWLINEThe main result of the paper is that a star flow on a closed 3-manifold either has a finite number of attractors or can be \(C^1\) approximated by vector fields exhibiting orbit-flip homoclinic orbits.NEWLINENEWLINENote that a closed 3-manifold denotes a compact connected boundaryless Riemannian manifold of dimension 3. A star flow is a flow corresponding to a vector field which cannot be \(C^1\) approximated by ones with non hyperbolic closed orbits. Finally, an orbit-flip homoclinic orbit is a trajectory connecting the singularity \(\sigma\) back to itself, where the eigenvalues \(\lambda_1,\lambda_2,\lambda_3\) of \(\sigma\) are real and satisfy \(\lambda_2<0<\lambda_3<\lambda_1\), and the homoclinic orbit lies in the strong unstable manifold, which is the invariant manifold tangent to the eigenspace at \(\sigma\) associated to the eigenvalue \(\lambda_1\).