Strange attractors and wandering domains near a homoclinic cycle to a bifocus

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the three-dimensional chaotic set near a homoclinic cycle to a hyperbolic bifocus at which the vector field has negative divergence. If the invariant manifolds of the bifocus satisfy a non-degeneracy condition, a sequence of hyperbolic suspended horseshoes arises near the cycle, with one expanding and two contracting directions. We extend previous results on the field and we show that the first return map to a given cross section may be approximated by a map exhibiting heteroclinic tangencies associated to two periodic orbits. Under an additional hypothesis about the coexistence of two heteroclinically related periodic points (one without dominated splitting into one-dimensional sub-bundles), the heteroclinic tangencies can be slightly modified in order to satisfy Tatjer's conditions for a generalized tangency of codimension two. This configuration may be seen as the organizing center, by which one can obtain Bogdanov-Takens bifurcations and therefore, strange attractors, infinitely many sinks and non-trivial contracting wandering domains.