Dynamics of homoclinic tangles in periodically perturbed second-order equations (Q619866)

The authors derive a return map in the extended phase space that catches dynamical activities of all solutions staying in a neighborhood of an unperturbed homoclinic loop. By means of this map, they give a comprehensive description on the overall geometrical and dynamical structures of the associated homoclinic tangles in periodically perturbed second-order ordinary differential equations with dissipation. In particular, they prove the following theorem. Let \(\mu\) be the size of the perturbation and \(\Lambda_\mu\) be the entire homoclinic tangle: {\parindent=7mm \begin{itemize}\item[(i)]for infinitely many disjoint open sets of \(\mu\), \(\Lambda_\mu\) contains nothing else but a horseshoe of infinitely many branches (Theorem 1 in Section 4.2); \item[(ii)]for infinitely many disjoint open sets of \(\mu\), \(\Lambda_\mu\) contains nothing else but one sink and one horseshoe of infinitely many branches (Theorem 2 in Section 4.2); and \item[(iii)]there are infinitely many values of \(\mu\) for which the unstable manifold of a periodic saddle in Smale's horseshoe and the stable manifold of the same saddle form a non-degenerate, transversal homoclinic tangency in \(\Lambda_\mu\) (Theorem 3 in Section 4.2). \end{itemize}} The theory is then applied to the analysis of a periodically perturbed equation.