On birth of discrete Lorenz attractors under bifurcations of 3D maps with nontransversal heteroclinic cycles

Abstract

Lorenz attractors are important objects in the modern theory of chaos. The reason from one side is that they are met in various natural applications (fluid dynamics, mechanics, laser dynamics, etc.). At the same time, Lorenz attractors are robust, in the sense that they are generally not destroyed by small perturbations (autonomous, non-autonomous, stochastic). This allows us to be sure that the observed in the experiment object is exactly the chaotic attractor, rather than a long-time periodic orbit. Discrete-time analogs of the Lorenz attractor possess even more complicated structure -- they allow homoclinic tangencies of invariant manifolds within the attractor. Thus, discrete Lorenz attractors belong to the class of wild chaotic attractors. These attractors can be born in codimension-three local and certain global (homoclinic and heteroclinic) bifurcations. While various homoclinic bifurcations leading to such attractors were studied, for heteroclinic cycles only cases when at least one of the fixed points is saddle-focus were considered to date. In the present paper the case of a heteroclinic cycle consisting of saddle fixed points with a quadratic tangency of invariant manifolds, is considered. It is shown that in order to have a three-dimensional chaos such as the discrete Lorenz attractors, one needs to avoid the existence of lower-dimensional global invariant manifolds. Thus, it is assumed that either the quadratic tangency or the transversal heteroclinic orbit is non-simple. The main result of the paper is the proof that the original system is the limiting point in the space of dynamical systems of a sequence of domains in which the diffeomorphism possesses discrete Lorenz attractors.