Integrability and non-integrability of periodic non-autonomous Lyness recurrences

Abstract

This paper studies non-autonomous Lyness type recurrences of the form $x_{n+2}=(a_n+x_{n+1})/x_{n}$, where $\{a_n\}$ is a $k$-periodic sequence of positive numbers with primitive period $k$. We show that for the cases $k\in\{1,2,3,6\}$ the behavior of the sequence $\{x_n\}$ is simple (integrable) while for the remaining cases satisfying this behavior can be much more complicated (chaotic). We also show that the cases where $k$ is a multiple of 5 present some different features.