Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Given a Hamiltonian system, normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds and their stable and unstable manifolds are important landmarks that organize the long term behaviour.

When the stable and unstable manifolds of a normally hyperbolic invarriant manifold intersect transversaly, there are homoclinic orbits that converge to the manifold both in the future and in the past. Actually, the orbits are asymptotic both in the future and in the past.

One can construct approximate orbits of the system by chainging several of these homoclinic excursions.

A recent result with M. Gidea and T. M.-Seara shows that if we consider long enough such excursions, there is a true orbit that follows it. This can be considered as an extension of the classical shadowing theorem, that allows to handle some non-hyperbolic directions