6533b86dfe1ef96bd12ca5b7

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Chaotic dynamics and partial hyperbolicity

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The dynamics of hyperbolic systems is considered well understood from topological point of view as well as from stochastic point of view. S. Smale and R. Abraham gave an example showing that, in general, the hyperbolic systems are not dense among all differentiable systems. In 1970s, M. Brin and Y. Pesin proposed a new notion: partial hyperbolicity to release the notion of hyperbolicity. One aim of this thesis is to understand the dynamics of certain partially hyperbolic systems from stochastic point of view as well as from topological point of view. From stochastic point of view, we prove the following results: — There exists an open and dense subset U of robustly transitive nonhyperbolic diffeomorphisms far from homoclinic tangency, such that forany f ∈ U, there exist non-hyperbolic ergodic measures as the weak*- limit of periodic measures, with only one vanishing Lyapunov exponent, and whose supports are the whole manifold; — There exists an open and dense subset of partially hyperbolic (but nonhyperbolic) diffeomorphisms with center dimension one whose strong foliations are robustly minimal, such that the closure of the set of ergodic measures is the union of two convex sets which are the closure of the sets of hyperbolic ergodic measures of two different s-indices respectively; these two convex sets intersect along the closure of the set of nonhyperbolic ergodic measures. As a consequence, every non-hyperbolic ergodic measure is approximated by periodic measures. That is the case for robustly transitive perturbation of the time one map of a transitive Anosov flow, or of the skew product of an Anosov torus diffeomorphism by a rotation of the circle. These results are based on some local results whose statements involve in lots of technical definitions. From topological point of view, for any non-transitive Anosov flow on orientable 3-manifolds, we build new partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms by composing the time t-map of the Anosov flow (for t > 0 large) with Dehn twists along transverse tori. These new partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms are robustly dynamically coherent. This generalizes the special process in [BPP] for constructing new partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms to a general case. Furthermore, we prove that for the new partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms we built, their center foliations are topologically equivalent to the Anosov flows used for building them. As a consequence, one has that the structure of the center leaves of the new partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms is the same asthe structure of the orbits of an Anosov flow. The presence of non-hyperbolic ergodic measures shows the non-hyperbolicity of the systems. In this thesis, we also attempt to understand: to what extent, can the presence of non-hyperbolic ergodic measures character how far from hyperbolicity the systems are? We prove that, for generic diffeomorphisms, if a homoclinic class contains periodic orbits of different indices and without certain dominations, then there exists a non-hyperbolic ergodic measure with more than one vanishing Lyapunov exponents and whose support is the whole homoclinic class. The number of vanishing Lyapunov exponents shows how much hyperbolicity has been lost in such kind of systems.