Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems

We consider skew products on $M\times \mathbb{T}^{2}$ , where $M$ is the two-sphere or the two-torus, which are partially hyperbolic and semi-conjugate to an Axiom A diffeomorphism. This class of dynamics includes the open sets of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}$ -non-stable systems introduced by Abraham and Smale [Non-genericity of Ł-stability. Global Analysis (Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, XIV (Berkeley 1968)). American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1970, pp. 5–8.] and Shub [Topological Transitive Diffeomorphisms in $T^{4}$  (Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 206). Springer, Berlin, 1971, pp. 39–40]. We present sufficient conditions, both on the skew products and the potentials, for the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium states, and discuss their statistical stability.

We study continuous countably (strictly) monotone maps defined on a tame graph, i.e. a special Peano continuum for which the set containing branch points and end points has countable closure. In our investigation we confine ourselves to the countable Markov case. We show a necessary and sufficient condition under which a locally eventually onto, countably Markov map $f$ of a tame graph $G$ is conjugate to a map $g$ of constant slope. In particular, we show that in the case of a Markov map $f$ that corresponds to a recurrent transition matrix, the condition is satisfied for a constant slope $e^{h_{\text{top}}(f)}$ , where $h_{\text{top}}(f)$ is the topological entropy of $f$ . Moreover, we show that in our class the topological entropy $h_{\text{top}}(f)$ is achievable through horseshoes of the map $f$ .

A crossed product functor is said to be injective if it takes injective morphisms to injective morphisms. In this paper we show that every locally compact group $G$ admits a maximal injective crossed product $A\mapsto A\rtimes _{\text{inj}}G$ . Moreover, we give an explicit construction of this functor that depends only on the maximal crossed product and the existence of $G$ -injective $C^{\ast }$ -algebras; this is a sort of ‘dual’ result to the construction of the minimal exact crossed product functor, the latter having been studied for its relationship to the Baum–Connes conjecture. It turns out that $\rtimes _{\text{inj}}$ has interesting connections to exactness, the local lifting property, amenable traces, and the weak expectation property.

We prove a conditional theorem on the positivity of the Lyapunov exponent for a Schrödinger cocycle over a skew-shift base with a cosine potential and the golden ratio as frequency. For coupling below $1$ , which is the threshold for Herman’s subharmonicity trick, we formulate three conditions on the Lyapunov exponent in a finite but large volume and on the associated large-deviation estimates at that scale. Our main results demonstrate that these finite-size conditions imply the positivity of the infinite-volume Lyapunov exponent. This paper shows that it is possible to make the techniques developed for the study of Schrödinger operators with deterministic potentials, based on large-deviation estimates and the avalanche principle, effective.

We consider a family of higher-dimensional non-commutative tori, which are twisted analogues of the algebras of continuous functions on ordinary tori and their Toeplitz extensions. Just as solenoids are inverse limits of tori, our Toeplitz non-commutative solenoids are direct limits of the Toeplitz extensions of non-commutative tori. We consider natural dynamics on these Toeplitz algebras, and we compute the equilibrium states for these dynamics. We find a large simplex of equilibrium states at each positive inverse temperature, parametrized by the probability measures on an (ordinary) solenoid.

This paper concerns the study of the global structure of measure-preserving actions of countable groups on standard probability spaces. Weak containment is a hierarchical notion of complexity of such actions, motivated by an analogous concept in the theory of unitary representations. This concept gives rise to an associated notion of equivalence of actions, called weak equivalence, which is much coarser than the notion of isomorphism (conjugacy). It is well understood now that, in general, isomorphism is a very complex notion, a fact which manifests itself, for example, in the lack of any reasonable structure in the space of actions modulo isomorphism. On the other hand, the space of weak equivalence classes is quite well behaved. Another interesting fact that relates to the study of weak containment is that many important parameters associated with actions, such as the type, cost, and combinatorial parameters, turn out to be invariants of weak equivalence and in fact exhibit desirable monotonicity properties with respect to the pre-order of weak containment, a fact that can be useful in certain applications. There has been quite a lot of activity in this area in the last few years, and our goal in this paper is to provide a survey of this work.

We show that a natural generalization of compressibility is the sole obstruction to the existence of a cocycle-invariant Borel probability measure.

Let be a dominant rational self-map of a smooth projective variety defined over $\overline{\mathbb{Q}}$ . For each point $P\in X(\overline{\mathbb{Q}})$ whose forward $f$ -orbit is well defined, Silverman introduced the arithmetic degree $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}_{f}(P)$ , which measures the growth rate of the heights of the points $f^{n}(P)$ . Kawaguchi and Silverman conjectured that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}_{f}(P)$ is well defined and that, as $P$ varies, the set of values obtained by $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}_{f}(P)$ is finite. Based on constructions by Bedford and Kim and by McMullen, we give a counterexample to this conjecture when $X=\mathbb{P}^{4}$ .

A celebrated result by Bourgain and Wierdl states that ergodic averages along primes converge almost everywhere for $L^{p}$ -functions, $p>1$ , with a polynomial version by Wierdl and Nair. Using an anti-correlation result for the von Mangoldt function due to Green and Tao, we observe everywhere convergence of such averages for nilsystems and continuous functions.

We prove that generic fiber-bunched and Hölder continuous linear cocycles over a non-uniformly hyperbolic system endowed with a $u$ -Gibbs measure have simple Lyapunov spectrum. This gives an affirmative answer to a conjecture proposed by Viana in the context of fiber-bunched linear cocycles.

In this paper we give an answer to Furstenberg’s problem on topological disjointness. Namely, we show that a transitive system $(X,T)$ is disjoint from all minimal systems if and only if $(X,T)$ is weakly mixing and there is some countable dense subset $D$ of $X$ such that for any minimal system $(Y,S)$ , any point $y\in Y$ and any open neighbourhood $V$ of $y$ , and for any non-empty open subset $U\subset X$ , there is $x\in D\cap U$ such that $\{n\in \mathbb{Z}_{+}:T^{n}x\in U,S^{n}y\in V\}$ is syndetic. Some characterization for the general case is also given. By way of application we show that if a transitive system $(X,T)$ is disjoint from all minimal systems, then so are $(X^{n},T^{(n)})$ and $(X,T^{n})$ for any $n\in \mathbb{N}$ . It turns out that a transitive system $(X,T)$ is disjoint from all minimal systems if and only if the hyperspace system $(K(X),T_{K})$ is disjoint from all minimal systems.

Group actions on a Smale space and the actions induced on the $\text{C}^{\ast }$ -algebras associated to such a dynamical system are studied. We show that an effective action of a discrete group on a mixing Smale space produces a strongly outer action on the homoclinic algebra. We then show that for irreducible Smale spaces, the property of finite Rokhlin dimension passes from the induced action on the homoclinic algebra to the induced actions on the stable and unstable $\text{C}^{\ast }$ -algebras. In each of these cases, we discuss the preservation of properties (such as finite nuclear dimension, ${\mathcal{Z}}$ -stability, and classification by Elliott invariants) in the resulting crossed products.

A nilspace system is a generalization of a nilsystem, consisting of a compact nilspace $\text{X}$ equipped with a group of nilspace translations acting on $\text{X}$ . Nilspace systems appear in different guises in several recent works and this motivates the study of these systems per se as well as their relation to more classical types of systems. In this paper we study morphisms of nilspace systems, i.e., nilspace morphisms with the additional property of being consistent with the actions of the given translations. A nilspace morphism does not necessarily have this property, but one of our main results shows that it factors through some other morphism which does have the property. As an application we obtain a strengthening of the inverse limit theorem for compact nilspaces, valid for nilspace systems. This is used in work of the first- and third-named authors to generalize the celebrated structure theorem of Host and Kra on characteristic factors.

Wieler has shown that every irreducible Smale space with totally disconnected stable sets is a solenoid (i.e., obtained via a stationary inverse limit construction). Using her construction, we show that the associated stable $C^{\ast }$ -algebra is the stationary inductive limit of a $C^{\ast }$ -stable Fell algebra that has a compact spectrum and trivial Dixmier–Douady invariant. This result applies in particular to Williams solenoids along with other examples. Beyond the structural implications of this inductive limit, one can use this result to, in principle, compute the $K$ -theory of the stable $C^{\ast }$ -algebra. A specific one-dimensional Smale space (the $aab/ab$ -solenoid) is considered as an illustrative running example throughout.

We study $2$ -generated subgroups $\langle f,g\rangle <\operatorname{Homeo}^{+}(I)$ such that $\langle f^{2},g^{2}\rangle$ is isomorphic to Thompson’s group $F$ , and such that the supports of $f$ and $g$ form a chain of two intervals. We show that this class contains uncountably many isomorphism types. These include examples with non-abelian free subgroups, examples which do not admit faithful actions by $C^{2}$ diffeomorphisms on 1-manifolds, examples which do not admit faithful actions by $PL$ homeomorphisms on an interval, and examples which are not finitely presented. We thus answer questions due to Brin. We also show that many relatively uncomplicated groups of homeomorphisms can have very complicated square roots, thus establishing the behavior of square roots of $F$ as part of a general phenomenon among subgroups of $\operatorname{Homeo}^{+}(I)$ .

Let $(X_{A},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{A})$ be a shift of finite type and $\text{Aut}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{A})$ its corresponding automorphism group. Associated to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}\in \text{Aut}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{A})$ are certain Lyapunov exponents $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}^{-}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}^{+}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ , which describe asymptotic behavior of the sequence of coding ranges of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}^{n}$ . We give lower bounds on $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}^{-}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}^{+}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ in terms of the spectral radius of the corresponding action of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ on the dimension group associated to $(X_{A},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{A})$ . We also give lower bounds on the topological entropy $h_{\text{top}}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ in terms of a distinguished part of the spectrum of the action of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ on the dimension group, but show that, in general, $h_{\text{top}}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ is not bounded below by the logarithm of the spectral radius of the action of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ on the dimension group.

Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy is an invariant of measure-preserving actions of the group of integers that is central to classification theory. There are two recently developed invariants, sofic entropy and Rokhlin entropy, that generalize classical entropy to actions of countable groups. These new theories have counterintuitive properties such as factor maps that increase entropy. This survey article focusses on examples, many of which have not appeared before, that highlight the differences and similarities with classical theory.

We show that if a hyperbolic group acts geometrically on a CAT(0) cube complex, then the induced boundary action is hyperfinite. This means that for a cubulated hyperbolic group, the natural action on its Gromov boundary is hyperfinite, which generalizes an old result of Dougherty, Jackson and Kechris for the free group case.

For a non-generic, yet dense subset of $C^{1}$ expanding Markov maps of the interval we prove the existence of uncountably many Lyapunov optimizing measures which are ergodic, fully supported and have positive entropy. These measures are equilibrium states for some Hölder continuous potentials. We also prove the existence of another non-generic dense subset for which the optimizing measure is unique and supported on a periodic orbit. A key ingredient is a new $C^{1}$ perturbation theorem which allows us to interpolate between expanding Markov maps and the shift map on a finite number of symbols.

For $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in (1,2]$ the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$ -transformation $T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}:[0,1)\rightarrow [0,1)$ is defined by $T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}(x)=\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}x\hspace{0.6em}({\rm mod}\hspace{0.2em}1)$ . For $t\in [0,1)$ let $K_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}(t)$ be the survivor set of $T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$ with hole $(0,t)$ given by

$$\begin{eqnarray}K_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}(t):=\{x\in [0,1):T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}^{n}(x)\not \in (0,t)\text{ for all }n\geq 0\}.\end{eqnarray}$$

$E_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$

$t\in [0,1)$

$t\mapsto K_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}(t)$

$E_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in (1,2)$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in (1,2)$

$E_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in (1,2)$

$E_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$

$E_{2}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in (1,2)$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$

$K_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}(t)$

$t<\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}\leq 1-(1/\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD})$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}\in (1,2)$