Sufficient conditions under which a transitive system is chaotic

E. Akin, E. Glasner, W. Huang, S. Shao, X. Ye

Published 2009-01-15Version 1

Let (X,T) be a topologically transitive dynamical system. We show that if there is a subsystem (Y,T) of (X,T) such that (X\times Y, T\times T) is transitive, then (X,T) is strongly chaotic in the sense of Li and Yorke. We then show that many of the known sufficient conditions in the literature, as well as a few new results, are corollaries of this statement. In fact, the kind of chaotic behavior we deduce in these results is a much stronger variant of Li-Yorke chaos which we call uniform chaos. For minimal systems we show, among other results, that uniform chaos is preserved by extensions and that a minimal system which is not uniformly chaotic is PI.