Joint work with Stephanie Hittmeyer and Bernd Krauskopf (University of Auckland) and Katsutoshi Shinohara (Hitotsubashi University)

A blender is an intricate geometric structure of a three- or higher-dimensional diffeomorphism. Its characterising feature is that its invariant manifolds behave as geometric objects of a dimension that is larger than expected from the dimensions of the manifolds themselves. We consider here the question of how one can identify, characterize and also visualize the underlying hyperbolic set of a given diffeomorphism to verify whether it actually is a blender or not. More specifically, we employ advanced numerical techniques for the computation of global manifolds to identify the hyperbolic set and its stable and unstable manifolds in an explicit Henon-like family of three-dimensional diffeomorphisms. This allows to identify and illustrate clearly whether the hyperbolic set is a blender; in particular, we consider as a distinguishing feature the self-similar structure of the intersection set of the respective global invariant manifold with a plane. By checking and illustrating a denseness property, we are able to identify a parameter range over which the hyperbolic set is a blender, and we discuss and illustrate how the blender disappears.