Geometric Mechanism for Antimonotonicity in Scalar Maps with Two Critical Points

Concurrent creation and destruction of periodic orbits—antimonotonicity—for one-parameter scalar maps with at least two critical points are investigated. It is observed that if, for a parameter value, two critical points lie in an interval that is a chaotic attractor, then, generically, as the parameter is varied through any neighborhood of such a value, periodic orbits should be created and destroyed infinitely often. A general mechanism for this complicated dynamics for one-dimensional multimodal maps is proposed similar to the one of contact-making and contact-breaking homoclinic tangencies in two-dimensional dissipative maps. This subtle phenomenon is demonstrated in a detailed numerical study of a specific one-dimensional cubic map.