KNOTTED PERIODIC ORBITS AND CHAOTIC BEHAVIOR OF A CLASS OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL FLOWS

Abstract

This paper considers a class of three-dimensional systems constructed by rotating some planar symmetric polynomial vector fields. It shows that this class of systems has infinitely many distinct types of knotted periodic orbits, which lie on a family of invariant torus. For two three-dimensional systems, exact explicit parametric representations of the knotted periodic orbits are given. For their perturbed systems, the chaotic behavior is discussed by using two different methods.