The role of the saddle-foci on the structure of a Bykov attracting set (Q2301837)

The authors consider an autonomous \((\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2)\)-equivariant vector field \(f_0\) defined on the sphere \(\mathbb{S}^3 \subset \mathbb{R}^4\) exhibiting an attracting heteroclinic network between two saddle-foci \(\sigma_1\) and \(\sigma_2\) which belong to a flow-invariant submanifold whose existence is a consequence of the symmetry. This network consists of a two-dimensional sphere connecting \(\sigma_1\) and \(\sigma_2\) and two one-dimensional connections from \(\sigma_1\) to \(\sigma_2\). Then the authors perturb this vector field by a one-parameter family \((f_\lambda)_{\lambda \geq 0}\) in such a way that most of the features of \(f_0\) are unchanged but part of the symmetry is broken. The authors aim at understanding how the configuration of some invariant manifolds enables hyperbolic saddle-type behavior to coexist with infinitely many sinks and chaotic attractors. The two-dimensional invariant manifolds associated to the heteroclinic phenomena have been considered on previous references only locally, near an equilibrium or inside a tubular neighborhood of the cycle. In this work the authors focus on the behavior of the entire two-dimensional manifolds of the equilibria as organizers of the dynamics. The authors restrict to a model of such a family of vector fields in order to be able to compute the dynamical data.