Abstract We show the existence of large C¹ open sets of area-preserving endomorphisms of the two-torus which have no dominated splitting and are non-uniformly hyperbolic, meaning that Lebesgue almost every point has a positive and a negative Lyapunov exponent. The integrated Lyapunov exponents vary continuously with the dynamics in the C¹ topology and can be taken as far away from zero as desired. Explicit real analytic examples are obtained by deforming linear endomorphisms, including expanding ones. The technique works in nearly every homotopy class, and the examples are stably ergodic (in fact Bernoulli), provided that the linear map has no eigenvalue of modulus one.
Andersson et al. (Sun,) studied this question.