On global non-degeneracy conditions for chaotic behavior for a class of dynamical systems

Abstract

For about 25 years, global methods from the calculus of variations have been used to establish the existence of chaotic behavior for some classes of dynamical systems. Like the analytical approaches that were used earlier, these methods require nondegeneracy conditions, but of a weaker nature than their predecessors. Our goal here is study such a nondegeneracy condition that has proved useful in several contexts including some involving partial differential equations, and to show this condition has an equivalent formulation involving stable and unstable manifolds.