Genericity for Non-Wandering Surface Flows

Consider the set (chi ^{0}_{text {nw}}) of non-wandering continuous flows on a closed surface M. Then we show that such a flow can be approximated by a non-wandering flow v such that the complement M?Per(v) of the set of periodic points is the union of finitely many centers and finitely many homoclinic saddle connections. Using the approximation, the following are equivalent for a continuous non-wandering flow v on a closed connected surface M: (1) the non-wandering flow v is topologically stable in (chi ^{0}_{text {nw}}); (2) the orbit space M/v is homeomorphic to a closed interval; (3) the closed connected surface M is not homeomorphic to a torus but consists of periodic orbits and at most two centers. Moreover, we show that a closed connected surface has a topologically stable continuous non-wandering flow in (chi ^{0}_{text {nw}}) if and only if the surface is homeomorphic to either the sphere (mathbb {S}^{2}), the projective plane (mathbb {P}^{2}), or the Klein bottle (mathbb {K}^{2}).