Arnd Bäcker

In 1994, Jürgen Moser generalized Hénon’s area-preserving quadratic map to obtain a normal form for the family of four-dimensional, quadratic, symplectic maps. This map has at most four isolated fixed points. We show that the bounded dynamics of Moser’s six parameter family is organized by a codimension-three bifurcation, which we call a quadfurcation, that can create all four fixed points from none.
The bounded dynamics is typically associated with Cantor families of invariant tori around fixed points that are doubly elliptic. For Moser’s map there can be two such fixed points: this structure is not what one would expect from dynamics near the cross product of a pair of uncoupled Hénon maps, where there is at most one doubly elliptic point. We visualize the dynamics by escape time plots on 2D planes through the phase space and by 3D slices through the tori.

We investigate different aspects of chaotic dynamics in Hénon maps of dimension higher than 2. First, we review recent results on the existence of homoclinic points in 2-d and 4-d such maps, by demonstrating how they can be located with great accuracy using the parametrization method. Then we turn our attention to perturbations of Hénon maps by an angle variable that are defined on the solid torus, and prove the existence of uniformly hyperbolic solenoid attractors for an open set of parameters.We thus argue that higher-dimensional Hénon maps exhibit a rich variety of chaotic behavior that deserves to be further studied in a systematic way.