Flows with time-reversal symmetric limit sets on surfaces

TL;DR

This paper characterizes flows on surfaces with time-reversal symmetric limit sets, refining previous classifications and constructing complex examples with Lakes of Wada attractors and multiple complementary domains.

Contribution

It provides a new characterization of flows with time-reversal symmetric limit sets and constructs novel examples on spheres with intricate attractor structures.

Findings

Characterization of flows with time-reversal symmetric limit sets.

Construction of flows on spheres with Lakes of Wada attractors.

Examples with arbitrarily many complementary domains.

Abstract

The Long-time behavior of orbits is one of the most fundamental properties in dynamical systems. Poincar\'e studied the Poisson stability, which satisfies a time-reversal symmetric condition, to capture the property of whether points return arbitrarily near the initial positions after a sufficiently long time. Birkhoff introduced and studied the concept of non-wandering points, which is one of the time-reversal symmetric conditions. Moreover, minimality and pointwise periodicity satisfy the time-reversal symmetric condition for limit sets. This paper characterizes flows with the time-reversal symmetric condition for limit sets, which refine the characterization of irrational or Denjoy flows by Athanassopoulos. Using the description, we construct flows on a sphere with Lakes of Wada attractors and with an arbitrarily large number of complementary domains, which are flow versions of such examples of spherical homeomorphisms constructed by Boro\'{n}ski, \v{C}in\v{c}, and Liu.