Computability of the ergodic decomposition

The study of ergodic theorems from the viewpoint of computable analysis is a rich field of investigation. Interactions between algorithmic randomness, computability theory and ergodic theory have recently been examined by several authors. It has been observed that ergodic measures have better computability properties than non-ergodic ones. In a previous paper we studied the extent to which non-ergodic measures inherit the computability properties of ergodic ones, and introduced the notion of an effectively decomposable measure. We asked the following question: if the ergodic decomposition of a stationary measure is finite, is this decomposition effective? In this paper we answer the question in the negative.     

Robust Weak Ergodicity And Stable Ergodicity

In this paper, we define robust weak ergodicity and study the relation between robust weak ergodicity and stable ergodicity for conservative partially hyperbolic systems. We prove that a C^r(r > 1) conservative partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism is stably ergodic if it is robustly weakly ergodic and has positive (or negative) central exponents on a positive measure set. Furthermore, if the condition of robust weak ergodicity is replaced by weak ergodicity, then the diffeomophism is an almost stably ergodic system. Additionally, we show in dimension three, a C^r(r > 1) conservative partially hyperbolic diffeomorphism can be approximated by stably ergodic systems if it is robustly weakly ergodic and robustly has non-zero central exponents.     

Recurrence and ergodicity of interacting particle systems

Many interacting particle systems with short range interactions are not ergodic, but converge weakly towards a mixture of their ergodic invariant measures. The question arises whether a.s.the process eventually stays close to one of these ergodic states, or if it changes between the attainable ergodic states infinitely often (“recurrence”). Under the assumption that there exists a convergence–determining class of distributions that is (strongly) preserved under the dynamics, we show that the system is in fact recurrent in the above sense. We apply our method to several interacting particle systems, obtaining new or improved recurrence results. In addition, we answer a question raised by Ed Perkins concerning the change of the locally predominant type in a model of mutually catalytic branching. Received: 22 January 1999 / Revised version: 24 May 1999     

Hamiltonian loops from the ergodic point of view

Let G be the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a closed symplectic manifold Y. A loop h:S¹→G is called strictly ergodic if for some irrational number α the associated skew product map T:S¹×Y→S¹×Y defined by T(t,y)=(t+α,h(t)y) is strictly ergodic. In the present paper we address the following question. Which elements of the fundamental group of G can be represented by strictly ergodic loops? We prove existence of contractible strictly ergodic loops for a wide class of symplectic manifolds (for instance for simply connected ones). Further, we find a restriction on the homotopy classes of smooth strictly ergodic loops in the framework of Hofer’s bi-invariant geometry on G. Namely, we prove that their asymptotic Hofer’s norm must vanish. This result provides a link between ergodic theory and symplectic topology. Received July 7, 1998 / final version received September 14, 1998     

Dominated Pesin theory: convex sum of hyperbolic measures

In the uniformly hyperbolic setting it is well known that the set of all measures supported on periodic orbits is dense in the convex space of all invariant measures. In this paper we consider the converse question, in the non-uniformly hyperbolic setting: assuming that some ergodic measure converges to a convex combination of hyperbolic ergodic measures, what can we deduce about the initial measures?To every hyperbolic measure μ whose stable/unstable Oseledets splitting is dominated we associate canonically a unique class H(μ) of periodic orbits for the homoclinic relation, called its intersection class. In a dominated setting, we prove that a measure for which almost every measure in its ergodic decomposition is hyperbolic with the same index, such as the dominated splitting, is accumulated by ergodic measures if, and only if, almost all such ergodic measures have a common intersection class.We provide examples which indicate the importance of the domination assumption.     

Upper Bounds on the Rate of Quantum Ergodicity

We study the semiclassical behaviour of eigenfunctions of quantum systems with ergodic classical limit. By the quantum ergodicity theorem almost all of these eigenfunctions become equidistributed in a weak sense. We give a simple derivation of an upper bound of order on the rate of quantum ergodicity if the classical system is ergodic with a certain rate. In addition we obtain a similar bound on transition amplitudes if the classical system is weak mixing. Both results generalise previous ones by Zelditch. Communicated by Jens Marklof Submitted: March 16, 2005 Accepted: February 2, 2006     

Intrinsic ergodicity beyond specification: β-shifts, S-gap shifts, and their factors

We give sufficient conditions for a shift space (Σ, σ) to be intrinsically ergodic, along with sufficient conditions for every subshift factor of Σ to be intrinsically ergodic. As an application, we show that every subshift factor of a β-shift is intrinsically ergodic, which answers an open question included in Mike Boyle’s article “Open problems in symbolic dynamics”. We obtain the same result for S-gap shifts, and describe an application of our conditions to more general coded systems. One novelty of our approach is the introduction of a new version of the specification property that is well adapted to the study of symbolic spaces with a non-uniform structure.     

On strictly ergodic models which are not almost topologically conjugate

Answering a question raised by Glasner and Rudolph (1984) we construct uncountably many strictly ergodic topological systems which are metrically isomorphic to a given ergodic system (X, ℬ,μ, T) but not almost topologically conjugate to it. This paper is part of the second author’s Ph.D. thesis, written under the supervision of Professor A. Bellow of the Department of Mathematics, Northwestern University. The author is grateful for her encouragement and advice. We acknowledge B. Weiss for helpful comments.     

On strictly weakly mixing <Emphasis Type="Italic">C</Emphasis>*-dynamical systems

We consider strictly ergodic and strictly weakly mixing C*-dynamical cystems. We establish that a system is strictly weakly mixing if and only if its tensor product is strictly ergodic and strictly weakly mixing. We also investigate some weighted uniform ergodic theorem with respect to S-Besicovitch sequences for strictly weakly mixing dynamical systems.     

Möbius disjointness for models of an ergodic system and beyond

Given a topological dynamical system (X, T) and an arithmetic function u: ? → ?, we study the strong MOMO property (relatively to u) which is a strong version of u-disjointness with all observable sequences in (X, T). It is proved that, given an ergodic measure-preserving system (Z, \(\mathcal{D}\), к, R),the strong MOMO propertly (relately to u) of a uniquely ergodic midel (X, T)of R yields all other uniquely ergodic midel of R to be u-disjiont. It follows that all uniquely ergodic models of: ergodic unipotent diffeomorphisms on nilmanifolds, discrete spectrum automorphisms, systems given by some substitutions of constant length (including the classical Thue—Viorse and Rudin—Shapiro substitutions), systems determined by Kakutani sequences are Möbius (and Liouville) disjoint. The validity of Sarnak5s conjecture implies the strong MOMO property relatively to μ in all zero entropy systems; in particular, it makes μ-disjointness uniform. The absence of the strong MOMO property in positive entropy systems is discussed and it is proved that, under the Chowla conjecture, a topological system has the strong MOMO property relatively to the Liouville function if and only if its topological entropy is zero.     

Ergodic properties of triangle partitions

We study the ergodic properties of a map called the Triangle Sequence. We prove that the algorithm is weakly convergent almost surely, and ergodic. As far as we know, it is the first example of a 2-dimensional algorithm where a surprising diophantine phenomenon happens: there are sequences of nested cells whose intersection is a segment, although no vertex is fixed. Examples of n-dimensional algorithms presenting this behavior were known for n ≥ 3.      

Inverse shadowing and related measures In Memory of Professor Shantao Liao

We study various weaker forms of the inverse shadowing property for discrete dynamical systems on a smooth compact manifold. First, we introduce the so-called ergodic inverse shadowing property(Birkhoff averages of continuous functions along an exact trajectory and the approximating one are close). We demonstrate that this property implies the continuity of the set of invariant measures in the Hausdorff metric. We show that the class of systems with ergodic inverse shadowing is quite broad; it includes all diffeomorphisms with hyperbolic nonwandering sets. Second, we study the so-called individual inverse shadowing(any exact trajectory can be traced by approximate ones, but this shadowing is not uniform with respect to the initial point of the trajectory).We demonstrate that this property is closely related to structural stability and ?-stability of diffeomorphisms.     

Shift ergodicity for stationary Markov processes

In this paper shift ergodicity and related topics are studied for certain stationary processes. We first present a simple proof of the conclusion that every stationary Markov process is a generalized convex combination of stationary ergodic Markov processes. A direct consequence is that a stationary distribution of a Markov process is extremal if and only if the corresponding stationary Markov process is time ergodic and every stationary distribution is a generalized convex combination of such extremal ones. We then consider space ergodicity for spin flip particle systems. We prove space shift ergodicity and mixing for certain extremal invariant measures for a class of spin systems, in which most of the typical models, such as the Voter Models and the Contact Models, are included. As a consequence of these results we see that for such systems, under each of those extremal invariant measures, the space and time means of an observable coincide, an important phenomenon in statistical physics. Our results provide partial answers to certain interesting problems in spin systems.     

The structure of strongly stationary systems

Motivated by a problem in ergodic Ramsey theory, Furstenberg and Katznelson introduced the notion of strong stationarity, showing that certain recurrence properties hold for arbitrary measure preserving systems if they are valid for strongly stationary ones. We construct some new examples and prove a structure theorem for strongly stationary systems. The building blocks are Bernoulli systems and rotations on nilmanifolds.     

Pointwise and Ergodic Convergence Rates of a Variable Metric Proximal Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

In this paper, we obtain global pointwise and ergodic convergence rates for a variable metric proximal alternating direction method of multipliers for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems. We first propose and study nonasymptotic convergence rates of a variable metric hybrid proximal extragradient framework for solving monotone inclusions. Then, the convergence rates for the former method are obtained essentially by showing that it falls within the latter framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that global pointwise (resp. pointwise and ergodic) convergence rates are obtained for the variable metric proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (resp. variable metric hybrid proximal extragradient framework).     

Compact abelian group extensions of discrete dynamical systems

Summary This paper introduces the notion of a free G extension of a dynamical system where G is a compact abelian group. The concept is closely allied to that of generalised discrete spectrum (which includes Abramov's quasi-discrete spectrum as a special case). We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a G extension of a minimal (uniquely ergodic) dynamical system to be minimal (uniquely ergodic) and show that in a certain sense a general G extension lifts these properties. Stable G-extensions always lift these properties if the underlying space is connected. This fact is then used to characterise all uniquely ergodic and minimal affine transformations of a certain three dimensional nilmanifold. The rest of the paper is devoted to the exhibition of group invariants for systems with generalised discrete spectrum. In particular it is shown that such systems always have a compact abelian group as underlying space. A lemma which facilitates this result gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a connected G-extension of a compact abelian group to be a compact abelian group.     

Generic points for dynamical systems with average shadowing

We study the Besicovitch pseudometric \(D_B\) for compact dynamical systems. The set of generic points of ergodic measures turns out to be closed with respect to \(D_B\). It is proved that the weak specification property implies the average asymptotic shadowing property and the latter property does not imply the former one nor the almost specification property. Furthermore an example of a proximal system with the average shadowing property is constructed. It is proved that to every invariant measure \(\mu \) of a compact dynamical system one can associate a certain asymptotic pseudo orbit such that any point asymptotically tracing in average that pseudo orbit is generic for \(\mu \). A simple consequence of the theory presented is that every invariant measure has a generic point in a system with the asymptotic average shadowing property.     

CONVERGENCE THEOREMS AND MAXIMAL INEQUALITIES FOR MARTINGALE ERGODIC PROCESSES

In this article, we study two types of martingale ergodic processes. We prove that a.e. convergence and L^p convergence as well as maximal inequalities, which are established both in ergodic theory and martingale setting, also hold well for these new sequences of random variables. Moreover, the corresponding theorems in the former two areas turn out to be degenerate cases of the martingale ergodic theorems proved here.     

Ergodicity of Rokhlin cocycles

We develop a general study of ergodic properties of extensions of measure preserving dynamical systems. These extensions are given by cocycles (called here Rokhlin cocycles) taking values in the group of automorphisms of a measure space which represents the fibers. We use two different approaches in order to study ergodic properties of such extensions. The first approach is based on properties of mildly mixing group actions and the notion of complementary algebra. The second approach is based on spectral theory of unitary representations of locally compact Abelian groups and the theory of cocycles taking values in such groups. Finally, we examine the structure of self-joinings of extensions. We partially answer a question of Rudolph on lifting mixing (and multiple mixing) property to extensions and answer negatively a question of Robinson on lifting Bernoulli property. We also shed new light on some earlier results of Glasner and Weiss on the class of automorphisms disjoint from all weakly mixing transformations. Answering a question asked by Thouvenot we establish a relative version of the Foiaş—Stratila theorem on Gaussian—Kronecker dynamical systems. Research partially supported by KBN grant 2 P03A 002 14 (1998).     

The large deviations theorem and ergodicity

In this paper, some relationships between stochastic and topological properties of dynamical systems are studied. For a continuous map f from a compact metric space X into itself, we show that if f satisfies the large deviations theorem then it is topologically ergodic. Moreover, we introduce the topologically strong ergodicity, and prove that if f is a topologically strongly ergodic map satisfying the large deviations theorem then it is sensitively dependent on initial conditions.