Abstract
We establish a general result on the existence of hypercyclic (resp., transitive, weakly mixing, mixing, frequently hypercyclic) polynomials on locally convex spaces. As a consequence we prove that every (real or complex) infinite-dimensional separable Fréchet space admits mixing (hence hypercyclic) polynomials of arbitrary positive degree. Moreover, every complex infinite-dimensional separable Banach space with an unconditional Schauder decomposition and every complex Fréchet space with an unconditional basis support chaotic and frequently hypercyclic polynomials of arbitrary positive degree. We also study distributional chaos for polynomials and show that every infinite-dimensional separable Banach space supports polynomials of arbitrary positive degree that have a dense distributionally scrambled linear manifold.