Degree of recurrence of generic diffeomorphisms

Abstract

We study spatial discretizations of dynamical systems: is it possible to recover some dynamical features of a system from numerical simulations? Here, we tackle this issue for the simplest algorithm possible: we compute long segments of orbits with a fixed number of digits. We show that for every $r\ge 1$, the dynamics of the discretizations of a $C^r$ generic conservative diffeomorphism of the torus is very different from that observed in the $C^0$ regularity. The proof of our results involves in particular a local-global formula for discretizations, as well as a study of the corresponding linear case, which uses ideas from the theory of quasicrystals.