Dynamics of homeomorphisms of the torus homotopic to Dehn twists

Abstract

In this paper we consider torus homeomorphisms $f$ homotopic to Dehn twists. We prove that if the vertical rotation set of $f$ is reduced to zero, then there exists a compact connected essential "horizontal" set K, invariant under $f$. In other words, if we consider the lift $\hat{f}$ of $f$ to the cylinder, which has zero vertical rotation number, then all points have uniformly bounded motion under iterates of $\hat{f}$. Also, we give a simple explicit condition which, when satisfied, implies that the vertical rotation set contains an interval and thus also implies positive topological entropy. As a corollary of the above results, we prove a version of Boyland's conjecture to this setting: If $f$ is area preserving and has a lift $\hat{f}$ to the cylinder with zero Lebesgue measure vertical rotation number, then either the orbits of all points are uniformly bounded under $\hat{f}$, or there are points in the cylinder with positive vertical velocity and others with negative vertical velocity.