Cherry flow: physical measures and perturbation theory

Abstract

In this article we consider Cherry flows on torus which have two singularities: a source and a saddle, and no periodic orbits. We show that every Cherry flow admits a unique physical measure, whose basin has full volume. This proves a conjecture given by R. Saghin and E. Vargas in~\cite{SV}. We also show that the perturbation of Cherry flow depends on the divergence at the saddle: when the divergence is negative, this flow admits a neighborhood, such that any flow in this neighborhood belongs to the following three cases: (a) has a saddle connection; (b) a Cherry flow; (c) a Morse-Smale flow whose non-wandering set consists two singularities and one periodic sink. In contrary, when the divergence is non-negative, this flow can be approximated by non-hyperbolic flow with arbitrarily larger number of periodic sinks.