How often surface diffeomorphisms have infinitely many sinks and hyperbolicity of periodic points near a homoclinic tangency

Here we study an amazing phenomenon discovered by Newhouse [S. Newhouse, Non-density of Axiom A(a) on S2, in: Proc. Sympos. Pure Math., vol. 14, Amer. Math. Soc., 1970, pp. 191–202; S. Newhouse, Diffeomorphisms with infinitely many sinks, Topology 13 (1974) 9–18; S. Newhouse, The abundance of wild hyperbolic sets and nonsmooth stable sets of diffeomorphisms, Publ. Math. Inst. Hautes Études Sci. 50 (1979) 101–151]. It turns out that in the space of Cr smooth diffeomorphisms Diffr(M) of a compact surface M there is an open set U such that a Baire generic diffeomorphism f ∈ U has infinitely many coexisting sinks. In this paper we make a step towards understanding “how often does a surface diffeomorphism have infinitely many sinks.” Our main result roughly says that with probability one for any positive D a surface diffeomorphism has only finitely many localized sinks either of cyclicity bounded by D or those whose period is relatively large compared to its cyclicity. It verifies a particular case of Palis’ Conjecture saying that even though diffeomorphisms with infinitely many coexisting sinks are Baire generic, they have probability zero. One of the key points of the proof is an application of Newton Interpolation Polynomials to study the dynamics initiated in [V. Kaloshin, B. Hunt, A stretched exponential bound on the rate of growth of the number of periodic points for prevalent diffeomorphisms I, Ann. of Math., in press, 92 pp.; V. Kaloshin, A stretched exponential bound on the rate of growth of the number of periodic points for prevalent diffeomorphisms II, preprint, 85 pp.].