The Transverse Homoclinic Dynamics and their Bifurcations at Nonhyperbolic Fixed Points

The complete description of the dynamics of diffeomorphisms in a neighborhood of a transverse homoclinic orbit to a hyperbolic fixed point is obtained. It is topologically conjugate to a non-Bernoulli shift called <!-- MATH $\{ {\sum,\sigma } \}$ --> . We also obtain a more or less complete picture, referred to as the net weaving bifurcation, when the fixed point of such a system is undergoing the generic saddle-node bifurcation. The idea of homotopy conjugacy is naturally introduced to show that systems whose fixed points undergo the pitchfork, transcritical, periodic doubling, and Hopf bifurcations are all homotopically conjugate to our shift dynamics <!-- MATH $\{ {\sum,\sigma } \}$ --> in a neighborhood of a transverse homoclinic orbit. These bifurcations are also examined in the context of the spectral decomposition with respect to the maximal indecomposable nonwandering sets.