The nature of the classical Hénon attractor at $a=1.4$, $b=0.3$: strange attractor or stable periodic orbit?

The Hénon map at its classical parameters $(a,b)=(1.4,0.3)$ has displayed a fractal, seemingly chaotic attracting set in every numerical experiment since Hénon's 1976 paper, yet no rigorous argument decides what it is: a genuine strange attractor (for example, one carrying an ergodic physical/SRB measure with a positive Lyapunov exponent) or a stable periodic orbit of very high period. Galias and Tucker (2015) rigorously verified stable low-period periodic orbits at parameter values extremely close to the classical ones, making the periodic alternative concretely plausible and showing that trajectory computation can never practically decide it. The problem is to determine, with mathematical rigor valid at exactly the classical parameters, the nature of the observed attractor.

Background

The Hénon map is the two-parameter family of plane diffeomorphisms $H_{a,b}(x,y)=(1-a x^2+y,\; b x)$, introduced by Michel Hénon in 1976 as a minimal model reproducing the fractal structure that numerical studies of the Lorenz equations had revealed. For $0<|b|<1$ the map is dissipative (its Jacobian has constant determinant $-b$), and at the classical parameters $a=1.4$, $b=0.3$ iteration produces the celebrated Hénon attractor — the textbook computer-age example of a 'strange attractor', meaning a compact attracting invariant set that is not a finite union of periodic orbits and on which the dynamics appears chaotic. A precise modern formulation of 'chaotic attractor' asks for an ergodic physical measure (also called an SRB measure, after Sinai, Bowen, and Ruelle: an invariant measure whose time averages describe the behavior of Lebesgue-typical initial conditions in its basin) with a positive Lyapunov exponent, where a Lyapunov exponent measures the asymptotic exponential rate of separation of nearby orbits. The competing possibility is that the attracting set observed numerically is in fact a sink — an attracting (stable) periodic orbit — whose period is so large and whose convergence is so slow that finite computation cannot distinguish it from chaos.

Rigorous knowledge is strikingly asymmetric. Benedicks and Carleson (1991) proved that for a set of parameters of positive Lebesgue measure — with $a$ near $2$ and $b$ positive and small — the Hénon map has a strange attractor in the strong sense (a.e. orbit in a basin has a positive Lyapunov exponent along a persistently recurring critical orbit), and Benedicks and Young (1993) constructed SRB measures for those parameters. But the classical point $(1.4,0.3)$ lies far outside this perturbative regime, and the parameter-selection methods behind these theorems inherently cannot target one prescribed parameter value. In the one-dimensional analogue, Lyubich (2002) proved that almost every quadratic map is either regular (attracted to a periodic orbit) or stochastic (has an absolutely continuous invariant measure); no comparable fixed-parameter theory exists in two dimensions.

On the chaotic side at the classical parameters, computer-assisted proofs are strong but address non-attracting objects: Zgliczyński (1997) gave a computer-assisted proof of chaos in the Hénon map, and Galias and Zgliczyński (2001) proved rigorously, via interval arithmetic, the abundance of homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits and positive lower bounds for the topological entropy (a measure of orbit-complexity growth) of the classical Hénon map. These horseshoe-type results establish complicated invariant sets but say nothing about which invariant set attracts typical points. On the periodic side, Newhouse's 1979 theory implies that near a homoclinic tangency (a nontransversal intersection of the stable and unstable manifolds of a periodic point) sinks are dense in parameter space, so infinitely many stable periodic orbits can coexist with chaotic sets; Wilczak and Zgliczyński (2009) gave a computer-assisted proof that the Hénon map exhibits a homoclinic tangency, and Galias and Tucker (2013, 2015) rigorously verified, using interval-analysis tools, that stable periodic orbits (sinks) of low period exist for parameter values extremely close to $(1.4,0.3)$. This is the setting in which Galias and Tucker posed, as an explicit open question, whether the classical Hénon attractor is a strange attractor or simply a stable periodic orbit — noting that even if the latter were true, the expected length of the period and the slowness of convergence would make it practically impossible to establish by computing trajectories.

Problem Statement

Determine, with mathematical rigor valid at exactly the classical parameters $(a,b)=(1.4,0.3)$ of the Hénon map $H_{a,b}(x,y)=(1-a x^2+y,\; b x)$, the nature of the attractor observed numerically since 1976. Specifically, decide which of the following holds: (i) the map has a strange attractor in the strong sense — an attracting compact invariant set that carries an ergodic physical (SRB) measure with a positive Lyapunov exponent and attracts a set of initial conditions of positive Lebesgue measure (the numerically observed basin); or (ii) the observed attracting set is in fact a stable periodic orbit (sink), in which case its period should be identified and the orbit rigorously enclosed; or (iii) a rigorous determination of the $\omega$-limit set for Lebesgue-typical initial conditions in the numerically observed basin that decides the strange-versus-periodic nature of the attractor by ruling out both (i) and (ii) and identifying what the observed attractor is instead (for example an attractor carrying no physical measure, or a strange nonchaotic attractor whose physical measure has zero Lyapunov exponent). A result resolves the task only if it fixes this strange-versus-periodic nature; evidence obtained by perturbing the parameters, by finite-precision trajectory computation, by restricting attention to invariant subsets that do not exhaust the attractor, or by establishing only partial facts that leave this nature undecided — for instance enclosing the $\omega$-limit set in a compact region, estimating its dimension, proving it has zero planar measure, or excluding sinks only up to some finite period — does not answer the question; the classical formulation as the strange-attractor-versus-stable-periodic-orbit dichotomy is due to Galias and Tucker (2015).

References

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