Paper detail

Hopf-Zero singularities truly unfold chaos

We provide conditions to guarantee the occurrence of Shilnikov bifurcations in analytic unfoldings of some Hopf-Zero singularities through a beyond all order phenomenon: the exponentially small breakdown of invariant manifolds which coincide at any order of the normal form procedure. The conditions are computable and satisfied by generic singularities and generic unfoldings. The existence of Shilnikov bifurcations in the $\mathcal{C}^r$ case was already argued by Guckenheimer in the $80$'s. About the same time, endowing the space of $\mathcal{C}^\infty$ unfoldings with a convenient topology, persistence and density of the Shilnikov phenomenon was proved by Broer and Vegter in 1984. However, since the proof involves the use of flat perturbations, this approach is not valid in the analytic context. What is more, none of the mentioned approaches provide a computable criteria to decide whether a given unfolding exhibits Shilnikov bifurcations or not. This work ends the whole discussion by showing that, under generic and checkable hypothesis, any analytic unfolding of a Hopf-Zero singularity within the appropriate class contains Shilnikov homoclinic orbits, and as a consequence chaotic dynamics.