Foliations and Conjugacy:Anosov Structures in the plane

In a non-compact setting, the notion of hyperbolicity, and the associated structure of stable and unstable manifolds (for unbounded orbits), is highly dependent on the choice of metric used to define it. We consider the simplest version of this, the analogue for the plane of Anosov diffeomorphisms, studied earlier by W. White and P. Mendes. The two known topological conjugacy classes of such diffeomorphisms are linear hyperbolic automorphisms and translations. We show that if the structure of stable and unstable manifolds is required to be preserved by these conjugacies, the number of distinct equivalence classes of Anosov diffeomorphisms in the plane becomes infinite.