Moduli of stability for heteroclinic cycles of periodic solutions

Abstract

We consider $C^2$ vector fields in the three dimensional sphere with an attracting heteroclinic cycle between two periodic hyperbolic solutions with real Floquet multipliers. The proper basin of this attracting set exhibits historic behavior and from the asymptotic properties of its orbits we obtain a complete set of invariants under topological conjugacy in a neighborhood of the cycle. As expected, this set contains the periods of the orbits involved in the cycle, a combination of their angular speeds, the rates of expansion and contraction in linearizing neighborhoods of them, besides information regarding the transition maps and the transition times between these neighborhoods. We conclude with an application of this result to a class of cycles obtained by the lifting of an example of R. Bowen.