No elliptic points from fixed prime ends

We consider area preserving maps of surfaces and extend Mather's result on the equality of the closure of the four branches of saddles. He assumed elliptic fixed points to be Moser stable, while we require only that the derivative at this points to be a rotation by an angle different from zero. There are many results in the literature which require the hypothesis that elliptic periodic points be Moser stable that now can be extended to the case that the derivative at these points be an irrational rotation. The key point is to give more information on Cartwright and Littlewood's fixed point theorem, to show that the fixed point obtained by a fixed prime end can not be elliptic. Hypotheses then became easier to verify: non degeneracy of fixed points and nonexistence of saddle connections. As an application we show that the result immediately implies that for the standard map family, for all values of the parameter, except one, the principal hyperbolic fixed point has homoclinic points. We also extend results to surfaces with boundary in order to be applicable to return maps to surfaces of section and broken book decompositions.