Non-degenerate evolution algebras

In this paper we introduce a new invariant for a non-degenerate evolution algebra, which consists of an ordered sequence of evolution algebras of lower dimension, belonging all of them to a specific family. We use this invariant to propose a method to classify non-degenerate evolution algebras, and we apply it up to dimension 3. We also use it to describe the derivations of some families of evolution algebras and the variety of evolution algebras with square not greater than 1.