On November 25th, 2009, Sylvain CROVISIER defended his habilitation à diriger des recherches titled Perturbation de la dynamique de difféomorphismes en petite régularité. He first explained basic perturbation techniques:
- the Anosov-Katok procedure: you use more and more distorted conjugacies such that the limiting dynamics has new properties;
- the closing lemma of Pugh and the subsequent connecting lemmas of Hayashi and Bonatti-Crovisier: you try to glue pieces of orbits while avoiding intermediate visits to the support of the pertubation. This may force you to drop pieces of the orbits. Crovisier nevertheless managed to prove a generalized shadowing lemma constructing orbits guaranteed to visit some neighborhoods.
He then explained how the above was put to work. Together with François Béguin and Frédéric Le Roux, he used the first tool to realize almost arbitrary measurable dynamics as minimal, uniquely ergodic homeomorphisms on arbitray compact manifolds.
With Christian Bonatti, Enrique Pujals and other co-workers, he used the second set of tools (together with constructions of dominated splittings by Wen, Liao-Wen and his own central models) to get deep new results on the dynamics of C^1 generic diffeomorphisms.
Some of the most important ones state that, after a small C^1 perturbation, any diffeomorphism either has a strong global structure (i.e., a phenomenon in the sense of Pujals) or presents a simple obstruction (a mechanism, which one would like to be robust). Namely, up to C^1 perturbations, any diffeomorphism of a compact manifold is:
- Morse-Smale unless it has a transverse homoclinic intersection (this provides a description of an open and dense subset of the C^1 diffeomorphisms called the weak Palis conjecture);
- partially hyperbolic with a central bundle which is one-dimensional or a sum of two one-dimensional sub-bundles, unless it has a heterodimensional cycle or a homoclinic tangency;
- essentially hyperbolic (hyperbolic from the point of view of its attractors and repellers), unless it has a heterodimensional cycle or a homoclinic tangency.
In answer to the jury’s questions, Sylvain CROVISIER made several additional and more subjective comments:
- It is true that Mañé already characterized the non-hyperbolic diffeomorphisms as those having periodic points that can be made to bifurcate but the goal here is to get robust obstructions;
- It is not clear that dynamics with infinitely many chain recurrent classes can exist robustly: there is no known mechanism for that;
- It seems very difficult to get beyond C^1 with anything like the current techniques – even C^1+1/log seems out of reach;
- It is a reasonable to question to try and develop more precise description of the dynamics especially for the situations that hold on C^1 open sets and therefore occur on C^2 open sets, a usual requisite of ergodic theory techniques;
- The techniques have yielded results very analoguous to Zeeman Tolerance Stability conjecture. However such kinds of stability seem to have more philosophical appeal than a true rôle in the mathematical theory, as opposed to structural stability.
- It is not clear that the above decomposition of the space of C^1 diffeomorphisms extend to higher smoothness (even disregarding the enormous technical difficulties pertaining to the closing lemmas). For instance Bonatti and Diaz hope to show that any diffeomorphism can be C^1 approximated by a hyperbolic one or by one with a homoclinic tangency but this is not the case in the C^2 topology, because of Newhouse phenomenon.
- The techniques seem insufficient to study prevalent or Kolmogorov-typical dynamics.
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