Accurate calculation of heteroclinic and homoclinic orbits can be of significant importance in some classes of dynamical system problems. Yet for very strongly chaotic systems initial deviations from a true orbit will be magnified by a large exponential rate making direct computational methods fail quickly. In this paper, a method is developed that avoids direct calculation of the orbit by making use of the well-known stability property of the invariant unstable and stable manifolds. Under an area-preserving map, this property assures that any initial deviation from the stable (unstable) manifold collapses onto them under inverse (forward) iterations of the map. Using a set of judiciously chosen auxiliary points on the manifolds, long orbit segments can be calculated using the stable and unstable manifold intersections of the heteroclinic (homoclinic) tangle. Detailed calculations using the example of the kicked rotor are provided along with verification of the relation between action differences and certain areas bounded by the manifolds.

Homoclinic and unstable periodic orbits in chaotic systems play central roles in various semiclassical sum rules. The interferences between terms are governed by the action functions and Maslov indices. In this article, we identify geometric relations between homoclinic and unstable periodic orbits, and derive exact formulae expressing the periodic orbit classical actions in terms of corresponding homoclinic orbit actions plus certain phase space areas. The exact relations provide a basis for approximations of the periodic orbit actions as action differences between homoclinic orbits with well-estimated errors. This make possible the explicit study of relations between periodic orbits, which results in an analytic expression for the action differences between long periodic orbits and their shadowing decomposed orbits in the cycle expansion.

Semiclassical sum rules, such as the Gutzwiller trace formula, depend on the properties of periodic, closed, or homoclinic (heteroclinic) orbits. The interferences embedded in such orbit sums are governed by classical action functions and Maslov indices. For chaotic systems, the relative actions of such orbits can be expressed in terms of phase-space areas bounded by segments of stable and unstable manifolds and Moser invariant curves. This also generates direct relations between periodic orbits and homoclinic (heteroclinic) orbit actions. Simpler, explicit approximate expressions following from the exact relations are given with error estimates. They arise from asymptotic scaling of certain bounded phase-space areas. The actions of infinite subsets of periodic orbits are determined by their periods and the locations of the limiting homoclinic points on which they accumulate.

The magnitudes of the terms in periodic orbit semiclassical trace formulas are determined by the orbits' stability exponents. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple asymptotic relationship between those stability exponents and the phase-space positions of particular homoclinic points.

Homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits provide a skeleton of the full dynamics of a chaotic dynamical system and are the foundation of semiclassical sums for quantum wave packet, coherent state, and transport quantities. Here, the homoclinic orbits are organized according to the complexity of their phase-space excursions, and exact relations are derived expressing the relative classical actions of complicated orbits as linear combinations of those with simpler excursions plus phase-space cell areas bounded by stable and unstable manifolds. The total number of homoclinic orbits increases exponentially with excursion complexity, and the corresponding cell areas decrease exponentially in size as well. With the specification of a desired precision, the exponentially proliferating set of homoclinic orbit actions is expressible by a slower-than-exponentially increasing set of cell areas, which may present a means for developing greatly simplified semiclassical formulas.