We show that the ergodic integrals for the horocycle flow on the two-torus associated by Giulietti and Liverani with an Anosov diffeomorphism either grow linearly or are bounded; in other words, there are no deviations. For this, we use the topological invariance of the Artin–Mazur zeta function to exclude resonances outside the open unit disc. Transfer operators acting on suitable spaces of anisotropic distributions and their Ruelle determinants are the key tools used in the proof. As a bonus, we show that for any $C^\infty $ Anosov diffeomorphism F on the two-torus, the correlations for the measure of maximal entropy and $C^\infty $ observables decay with a rate strictly smaller than $e^{-h_{\mathrm {top}}(F)}$ . We compare our results with very recent related work of Forni.

We study the dynamical Borel–Cantelli lemma for recurrence sets in a measure-preserving dynamical system $(X, \mu , T)$ with a compatible metric d. We prove that under some regularity conditions, the $\mu $ -measure of the following set

$$\begin{align*}R(\psi)= \{x\in X : d(T^n x, x) < \psi(n)\ \text{for infinitely many}\ n\in\mathbb{N} \} \end{align*}$$

$\psi :\mathbb {N}\to \mathbb {R}^+$

$\beta $

In this work, we treat subshifts, defined in terms of an alphabet $\mathcal {A}$ and (usually infinite) forbidden list $\mathcal {F}$ , where the number of n-letter words in $\mathcal {F}$ has ‘slow growth rate’ in n. We show that such subshifts are well behaved in several ways; for instance, they are boundedly supermultiplicative in the sense of Baker and Ghenciu [Dynamical properties of S-gap shifts and other shift spaces. J. Math. Anal. Appl.430(2) (2015), 633–647] and they have unique measures of maximal entropy with the K-property and which satisfy Gibbs bounds on large (measure-theoretically) sets. The main tool in our proofs is a more general result, which states that bounded supermultiplicativity and a sort of measure-theoretic specification property together imply uniqueness of the measure of maximum entropy and our Gibbs bounds. We also show that some well-known classes of subshifts can be treated by our results, including the symbolic codings of $x \mapsto \alpha + \beta x$ (the so-called $\alpha $ - $\beta $ shifts of Hofbauer [Maximal measures for simple piecewise monotonic transformations. Z. Wahrsch. verw. Geb.52(3) (1980), 289–300]) and the bounded density subshifts of Stanley [Bounded density shifts. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys.33(6) (2013), 1891–1928].

We give a finitary criterion for the convergence of measures on non-elementary geometrically finite hyperbolic orbifolds to the unique measure of maximal entropy. We give an entropy criterion controlling escape of mass to the cusps of the orbifold. Using this criterion, we prove new results on the distribution of collections of closed geodesics on such an orbifold, and as a corollary, we prove the equidistribution of closed geodesics up to a certain length in amenable regular covers of geometrically finite orbifolds.

We prove that the automorphism group of the semigeneric directed graph (in the sense of Cherlin’s classification) is uniquely ergodic.

The renormalization group method has been developed to investigate p-adic q-state Potts models on the Cayley tree of order k. This method is closely related to the examination of dynamical behavior of the p-adic Potts–Bethe mapping which depends on the parameters q, k. In Mukhamedov and Khakimov [Chaotic behavior of the p-adic Potts–Behte mapping. Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst. 38 (2018), 231–245], we have considered the case when q is not divisible by p and, under some conditions, it was established that the mapping is conjugate to the full shift on $\kappa _p$ symbols (here $\kappa _p$ is the greatest common factor of k and $p-1$ ). The present paper is a continuation of the forementioned paper, but here we investigate the case when q is divisible by p and k is arbitrary. We are able to fully describe the dynamical behavior of the p-adic Potts–Bethe mapping by means of a Markov partition. Moreover, the existence of a Julia set is established, over which the mapping exhibits a chaotic behavior. We point out that a similar result is not known in the case of real numbers (with rigorous proofs).

We prove that, up to topological conjugacy, every Smale space admits an Ahlfors regular Bowen measure. Bowen’s construction of Markov partitions implies that Smale spaces are factors of topological Markov chains. The latter are equipped with Parry’s measure, which is Ahlfors regular. By extending Bowen’s construction, we create a tool for transferring the Ahlfors regularity of the Parry measure down to the Bowen measure of the Smale space. An essential part of our method uses a refined notion of approximation graphs over compact metric spaces. Moreover, we obtain new estimates for the Hausdorff, box-counting and Assouad dimensions of a large class of Smale spaces.

For a sequence of complex parameters $(c_n)$ we consider the composition of functions $f_{c_n} (z) = z^2 + c_n$ , the non-autonomous version of the classical quadratic dynamical system. The definitions of Julia and Fatou sets are naturally generalized to this setting. We answer a question posed by Brück, Büger and Reitz, whether the Julia set for such a sequence is almost always totally disconnected, if the values $c_n$ are chosen randomly from a large disc. Our proof is easily generalized to answer a lot of other related questions regarding typical connectivity of the random Julia set. In fact we prove the statement for a much larger family of sets than just discs; in particular if one picks $c_n$ randomly from the main cardioid of the Mandelbrot set, then the Julia set is still almost always totally disconnected.

We show that self-similar measures on $\mathbb R^d$ satisfying the weak separation condition are uniformly scaling. Our approach combines elementary ergodic theory with geometric analysis of the structure given by the weak separation condition.

If $\mathcal {A}$ is a finite set (alphabet), the shift dynamical system consists of the space $\mathcal {A}^{\mathbb {N}}$ of sequences with entries in $\mathcal {A}$ , along with the left shift operator S. Closed S-invariant subsets are called subshifts and arise naturally as encodings of other systems. In this paper, we study the number of ergodic measures for transitive subshifts under a condition (‘regular bispecial condition’) on the possible extensions of words in the associated language. Our main result shows that under this condition, the subshift can support at most $({K+1})/{2}$ ergodic measures, where K is the limiting value of $p(n+1)-p(n)$ , and p is the complexity function of the language. As a consequence, we answer a question of Boshernitzan from 1984, providing a combinatorial proof for the bound on the number of ergodic measures for interval exchange transformations.

Mixing rates, relaxation rates, and decay of correlations for dynamics defined by potentials with summable variations are well understood, but little is known for non-summable variations. This paper exhibits upper bounds for these quantities for dynamics defined by potentials with square-summable variations. We obtain these bounds as corollaries of a new block coupling inequality between pairs of dynamics starting with different histories. As applications of our results, we prove a new weak invariance principle and a Hoeffding-type inequality.

A Birkhoff billiard is a system describing the inertial motion of a point mass inside a strictly convex planar domain, with elastic reflections at the boundary. The study of the associated dynamics is profoundly intertwined with the geometric properties of the domain: while it is evident how the shape determines the dynamics, a more subtle and difficult question is the extent to which the knowledge of the dynamics allows one to reconstruct the shape of the domain. This translates into many intriguing inverse problems and unanswered rigidity questions, which have been the focus of very active research in recent decades. In this paper we describe some of these questions, along with their connection to other problems in analysis and geometry, with particular emphasis on recent results obtained by the authors and their collaborators.

We compute the gap distribution of directions of saddle connections for two classes of translation surfaces. One class will be the translation surfaces arising from gluing two identical tori along a slit. These yield the first explicit computations of gap distributions for non-lattice translation surfaces. We show that this distribution has support at zero and quadratic tail decay. We also construct examples of translation surfaces in any genus $d>1$ that have the same gap distribution as the gap distribution of two identical tori glued along a slit. The second class we consider are twice-marked tori and saddle connections between distinct marked points with a specific orientation. These results can be interpreted as the gap distribution of slopes of affine lattices. We obtain our results by translating the question of gap distributions to a dynamical question of return times to a transversal under the horocycle flow on an appropriate moduli space.

For random piecewise linear systems T of the interval that are expanding on average we construct explicitly the density functions of absolutely continuous T-invariant measures. If the random system uses only expanding maps our procedure produces all invariant densities of the system. Examples include random tent maps, random W-shaped maps, random $\beta $ -transformations and random Lüroth maps with a hole.

We extend the results of Hasselblatt and Schmeling [Dimension product structure of hyperbolic sets. Modern Dynamical Systems and Applications. Eds. B. Hasselblatt, M. Brin and Y. Pesin. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2004, pp. 331–345] and of Rams and Simon [Hausdorff and packing measure for solenoids. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. 23 (2003), 273–292] for $C^{1+\varepsilon }$ hyperbolic, (partially) linear solenoids $\Lambda $ over the circle embedded in $\mathbb {R}^3$ non-conformally attracting in the stable discs $W^s$ direction, to nonlinear solenoids. Under the assumptions of transversality and on the Lyapunov exponents for an appropriate Gibbs measure imposing thinness, as well as the assumption that there is an invariant $C^{1+\varepsilon }$ strong stable foliation, we prove that Hausdorff dimension $\operatorname {\mathrm {HD}}(\Lambda \cap W^s)$ is the same quantity $t_0$ for all $W^s$ and else $\mathrm {HD}(\Lambda )=t_0+1$ . We prove also that for the packing measure, $0<\Pi _{t_0}(\Lambda \cap W^s)<\infty $ , but for Hausdorff measure, $\mathrm {HM}_{t_0}(\Lambda \cap W^s)=0$ for all $W^s$ . Also $0<\Pi _{1+t_0}(\Lambda ) <\infty $ and $\mathrm {HM}_{1+t_0}(\Lambda )=0$ . A technical part says that the holonomy along unstable foliation is locally Lipschitz, except for a set of unstable leaves whose intersection with every $W^s$ has measure $\mathrm {HM}_{t_0}$ equal to 0 and even Hausdorff dimension less than $t_0$ . The latter holds due to a large deviations phenomenon.

We associate a flow $\phi $ with a solution of the vortex equations on a closed oriented Riemannian 2-manifold $(M,g)$ of negative Euler characteristic and investigate its properties. We show that $\phi $ always admits a dominated splitting and identify special cases in which $\phi $ is Anosov. In particular, starting from holomorphic differentials of fractional degree, we produce novel examples of Anosov flows on suitable roots of the unit tangent bundle of $(M,g)$ .

Let M be a geometrically finite acylindrical hyperbolic $3$ -manifold and let $M^*$ denote the interior of the convex core of M. We show that any geodesic plane in $M^*$ is either closed or dense, and that there are only countably many closed geodesic planes in $M^*$ . These results were obtained by McMullen, Mohammadi and Oh [Geodesic planes in hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Invent. Math.209 (2017), 425–461; Geodesic planes in the convex core of an acylindrical 3-manifold. Duke Math. J., to appear, Preprint, 2018, arXiv:1802.03853] when M is convex cocompact. As a corollary, we obtain that when M covers an arithmetic hyperbolic $3$ -manifold $M_0$ , the topological behavior of a geodesic plane in $M^*$ is governed by that of the corresponding plane in $M_0$ . We construct a counterexample of this phenomenon when $M_0$ is non-arithmetic.

In this paper, we study the centralizer of a partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism on ${\mathbb T}^3$ which is homotopic to an Anosov automorphism, and we show that either its centralizer is virtually trivial or such diffeomorphism is smoothly conjugate to its linear part.

We construct a sofic approximation of ${\mathbb F}_2\times {\mathbb F}_2$ that is not essentially a ‘branched cover’ of a sofic approximation by homomorphisms. This answers a question of L. Bowen.

We prove that, if f is a homeomorphism of the 2-torus isotopic to the identity whose rotation set is a non-degenerate segment and f has a periodic point, then it has uniformly bounded deviations in the direction perpendicular to the segment.