Abstract
We study Li-Yorke chaos and distributional chaos for operators on Banach spaces. More precisely, we characterize Li-Yorke chaos in terms of the existence of irregular vectors. Sufficient "computable" criteria for distributional and Li-Yorke chaos are given, together with the existence of dense scrambled sets under some additional conditions. We also obtain certain spectral properties. Finally, we show that every infinite dimensional separable Banach space admits a distributionally chaotic operator which is also hypercyclic. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.