Locally flat and wildly embedded separatrices in simplest Morse-Smale systems (Q695353)

Morse-Smale systems are well known as the simplest structurally stable systems. In fact every 2-dimensional Morse-Smale system is quite simple. However, the dynamics is far from being completely classified to 3-dimensional Morse-Smale systems. As stated in the present paper, the reasons are the existence of heteroclinic intersections of saddles and the possibility for the closure of separatrices to be wildly embedded. In this paper, the closures of separatrices of simple \(n\)-dimensional Morse-Smale systems are considered for \(n \geq 4\). Let \(M^n\) be a closed \(C^\infty\) \(n\)-dimensional manifold, \(n \geq 4\), and let \(\mathrm{MS}^{\mathrm{flow}}(M^n, k)\) and \(\mathrm{MS}^{\mathrm{diff}}(M^n, k)\) be the space Morse-Smale flows and diffeomorphisms of \(M^n\), respectively, such that each of the non-wandering sets of those consists of \(k\) fixed points. It is proved that the closure of any separatrix of \(f^t \in \mathrm{MS}^{\mathrm{flow}}(M^n, 3)\) is a locally flat \(\frac{n}2\)-sphere while there is \(f^t \in \mathrm{MS}^{\mathrm{flow}}(M^n, 4)\) such that the closure of some separatrix is a wildly embedded codimension-two sphere. Moreover, it is proved that for \(n \geq 6\), the closure of any separatrix of \(f \in \mathrm{MS}^{\mathrm{diff}}(M^n, 3)\) is a locally flat \(\frac{n}2\)-sphere while there is \(f \in \mathrm{MS}^{\mathrm{diff}}(M^4, 3)\) such that the closure of any separatrix is a wildly embedded 2-sphere.