Center bunching without dynamical coherence

Abstract

We answer a question of Burns and Wilkinson, showing that there are open families of volume-preserving partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms which are accessible and center bunched and neither dynamically coherent nor Anosov. We also show in the volume-preserving setting that any diffeomorphism which is partially hyperbolic and Anosov may be isotoped to a diffeomorphism which is partially hyperbolic and not Anosov.