A condition that implies full homotopical complexity of orbits for surface homeomorphisms

Abstract

We consider closed orientable surfaces $S$ of genus $g>1$ and homeomorphisms $f:S\rightarrow S$ isotopic to the identity. A set of hypotheses is presented, called a fully essential system of curves $\mathscr{C}$ and it is shown that under these hypotheses, the natural lift of $f$ to the universal cover of $S$ (the Poincaré disk $\mathbb{D}$), denoted by $\widetilde{f},$ has complicated and rich dynamics. In this context, we generalize results that hold for homeomorphisms of the torus isotopic to the identity when their rotation sets contain zero in the interior. In particular, for $C^{1+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ diffeomorphisms, we show the existence of rotational horseshoes having non-trivial displacements in every homotopical direction. As a consequence, we found that the homological rotation set of such an $f$ is a compact convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{2g}$ with maximal dimension and all points in its interior are realized by compact $f$-invariant sets and by periodic orbits in the rational case. Also, $f$ has uniformly bounded displacement with respect to rotation vectors in the boundary of the rotation set. This implies, in case where $f$ is area preserving, that the rotation vector of Lebesgue measure belongs to the interior of the rotation set.