Strange attractors with one direction of instability (Q5940434)

The main goal of the paper is to develop a general theory of strange attractors with one unstable direction and \(n-1\) directions of strong contraction, where \(n\) is the dimension of the phase space. Although the authors' approach is valid for any dimension, here they deal with the case \(n=2\). They show that the attractors in this class have many of the statistical properties associated with chaos: positive Lyapunov exponents, existence of SRB measures, and exponential decay of correlations. They also introduce the critical set characterized as those points on the attractor at which stable and unstable directions are interchanged. They prove that this set has a special geometric structure; it can be realized as the intersection of a nested sequence of rectangles with known geometric and dynamical properties.