Abstract
A rigorous numerical method for establishing the existence of a transversal connecting orbit from one hyperbolic periodic orbit to another of a differential equation in
$${\mathbb{R}^n}$$
is presented. As the first component of this method, a general shadowing theorem that guarantees the existence of such a connecting orbit near a suitable pseudo connection orbit given the invertibility of a certain operator is proved. The second component consists of a refinement procedure for numerically computing a pseudo connecting orbit between two pseudo periodic orbits with sufficiently small local errors so as to satisfy the hypothesis of the theorem. The third component consists of a numerical procedure to verify the invertibility of the operator and obtain a rigorous upper bound for the norm of its inverse. Using this method, existence of chaos is demonstrated on examples with transversal homoclinic orbits, and with cycles of transversal heteroclinic orbits.
