This paper studies various aspects of inverse limits of locally expanding affine linear maps on flat branched manifolds, which I call flat Wieler solenoids. Among the aspects studied are different types of cohomologies, the rates of mixing given by the Ruelle spectrum of the hyperbolic map acting on this space, and solutions of the cohomological equation in primitive substitution subshifts for Hölder functions. The overarching theme is that considerations of $\alpha $-Hölder regularity on Cantor sets go a long way.

Based on previous work of the authors, to any S-adic development of a subshift X a ‘directive sequence’ of commutative diagrams is associated, which consists at every level $n \geq 0$ of the measure cone and the letter frequency cone of the level subshift $X_n$ associated canonically to the given S-adic development. The issuing rich picture enables one to deduce results about X with unexpected directness. For instance, we exhibit a large class of minimal subshifts with entropy zero that all have infinitely many ergodic probability measures. As a side result, we also exhibit, for any integer $d \geq 2$, an S-adic development of a minimal, aperiodic, uniquely ergodic subshift X, where all level alphabets $\mathcal A_n$ have cardinality $d,$ while none of the $d-2$ bottom level morphisms is recognizable in its level subshift $X_n \subseteq \mathcal A_n^{\mathbb {Z}}$.

We show a new method of estimating the Hausdorff measure of a set from below. The method requires computing the subsequent closest return times of a point to itself.

We show that the measure of maximal entropy of every complex Hénon map is exponentially mixing of all orders for Hölder observables. As a consequence, the Central Limit Theorem holds for all Hölder observables.

In this work, we study ergodic and dynamical properties of symbolic dynamical system associated to substitutions on an infinite countable alphabet. Specifically, we consider shift dynamical systems associated to irreducible substitutions which have well-established properties in the case of finite alphabets. Based on dynamical properties of a countable integer matrix related to the substitution, we obtain results on existence and uniqueness of shift invariant measures.

We show that every ergodic Davies generator associated to any 2D Kitaev’s quantum double model has a nonvanishing spectral gap in the thermodynamic limit. This validates rigorously the extended belief that those models are useless as self-correcting quantum memories, even in the non-abelian case. The proof uses recent ideas and results regarding the characterization of the spectral gap for parent Hamiltonians associated to Projected Entangled Pair States in terms of a bulk-boundary correspondence.

Katok [Lyapunov exponents, entropy and periodic points of diffeomorphisms. Publ. Math. Inst. Hautes Études Sci. 51 (1980), 137–173] conjectured that every $C^{2}$ diffeomorphism f on a Riemannian manifold has the intermediate entropy property, that is, for any constant $c \in [0, h_{\mathrm {top}}(f))$, there exists an ergodic measure $\mu $ of f satisfying $h_{\mu }(f)=c$. In this paper, we obtain a conditional intermediate metric entropy property and two conditional intermediate Birkhoff average properties for basic sets of flows that characterize the refined roles of ergodic measures in the invariant ones. In this process, we establish a ‘multi-horseshoe’ entropy-dense property and use it to get the goal combined with conditional variational principles. We also obtain the same result for singular hyperbolic attractors.

Let $(M,g,J)$ be a closed Kähler manifold with negative sectional curvature and complex dimension $m := \dim _{\mathbb {C}} M \geq 2$. In this article, we study the unitary frame flow, that is, the restriction of the frame flow to the principal $\mathrm {U}(m)$-bundle $F_{\mathbb {C}}M$ of unitary frames. We show that if $m \geq 6$ is even and $m \neq 28$, there exists $\unicode{x3bb} (m) \in (0, 1)$ such that if $(M, g)$ has negative $\unicode{x3bb} (m)$-pinched holomorphic sectional curvature, then the unitary frame flow is ergodic and mixing. The constants $\unicode{x3bb} (m)$ satisfy $\unicode{x3bb} (6) = 0.9330...$, $\lim _{m \to +\infty } \unicode{x3bb} (m) = {11}/{12} = 0.9166...$, and $m \mapsto \unicode{x3bb} (m)$ is decreasing. This extends to the even-dimensional case the results of Brin and Gromov [On the ergodicity of frame flows. Invent. Math. 60(1) (1980), 1–7] who proved ergodicity of the unitary frame flow on negatively curved compact Kähler manifolds of odd complex dimension.

We prove results about subshifts with linear (word) complexity, meaning that $\limsup \frac {p(n)}{n} < \infty $, where for every n, $p(n)$ is the number of n-letter words appearing in sequences in the subshift. Denoting this limsup by C, we show that when $C < \frac {4}{3}$, the subshift has discrete spectrum, that is, is measurably isomorphic to a rotation of a compact abelian group with Haar measure. We also give an example with $C = \frac {3}{2}$ which has a weak mixing measure. This partially answers an open question of Ferenczi, who asked whether $C = \frac {5}{3}$ was the minimum possible among such subshifts; our results show that the infimum in fact lies in $[\frac {4}{3}, \frac {3}{2}]$. All results are consequences of a general S-adic/substitutive structure proved when $C < \frac {4}{3}$.

Let $l\in \mathbb {N}_{\ge 1}$ and $\alpha : \mathbb {Z}^l\rightarrow \text {Aut}(\mathscr {N})$ be an action of $\mathbb {Z}^l$ by automorphisms on a compact nilmanifold $\mathscr{N}$. We assume the action of every $\alpha (z)$ is ergodic for $z\in \mathbb {Z}^l\smallsetminus \{0\}$ and show that $\alpha $ satisfies exponential n-mixing for any integer $n\geq 2$. This extends the results of Gorodnik and Spatzier [Mixing properties of commuting nilmanifold automorphisms. Acta Math. 215 (2015), 127–159].

We prove that any strongly mixing action of a countable abelian group on a probability space has higher-order mixing properties. This is achieved via the utilization of $\mathcal R$-limits, a notion of convergence which is based on the classical Ramsey theorem. $\mathcal R$-limits are intrinsically connected with a new combinatorial notion of largeness which is similar to but has stronger properties than the classical notions of uniform density one and IP$^*$. While the main goal of this paper is to establish a universal property of strongly mixing actions of countable abelian groups, our results, when applied to ${\mathbb {Z}}$-actions, offer a new way of dealing with strongly mixing transformations. In particular, we obtain several new characterizations of strong mixing for ${\mathbb {Z}}$-actions, including a result which can be viewed as the analogue of the weak mixing of all orders property established by Furstenberg in the course of his proof of Szemerédi’s theorem. We also demonstrate the versatility of $\mathcal R$-limits by obtaining new characterizations of higher-order weak and mild mixing for actions of countable abelian groups.

We exhibit, for arbitrary $\epsilon> 0$, subshifts admitting weakly mixing (probability) measures with word complexity p satisfying $\limsup p(q) / q < 1.5 + \epsilon $. For arbitrary $f(q) \to \infty $, said subshifts can be made to satisfy $p(q) < q + f(q)$ infinitely often. We establish that every subshift associated to a rank-one transformation (on a probability space) which is not an odometer satisfies $\limsup p(q) - 1.5q = \infty $ and that this is optimal for rank-ones.

In this paper, we construct a uniformly recurrent infinite word of low complexity without uniform frequencies of letters. This shows the optimality of a bound of Boshernitzan, which gives a sufficient condition for a uniformly recurrent infinite word to admit uniform frequencies.

The action on the trace space induced by a generic automorphism of a suitable finite classifiable ${\mathrm {C}^*}$ -algebra is shown to be chaotic and weakly mixing. Model ${\mathrm {C}^*}$ -algebras are constructed to observe the central limit theorem and other statistical features of strongly chaotic tracial actions. Genericity of finite Rokhlin dimension is used to describe $KK$ -contractible stably projectionless ${\mathrm {C}^*}$ -algebras as crossed products.

We study the measurable dynamical properties of the interval map generated by the model-case erasing substitution $\rho $, defined by

$$ \begin{align*} \rho(00)=\text{empty word},\quad \rho(01)=1,\quad \rho(10)=0,\quad \rho(11)=01. \end{align*} $$

A probability measure-preserving action of a discrete amenable group G is said to be dominant if it is isomorphic to a generic extension of itself. Recently, it was shown that for $G = \mathbb {Z}$, an action is dominant if and only if it has positive entropy and that for any G, positive entropy implies dominance. In this paper, we show that the converse also holds for any G, that is, that zero entropy implies non-dominance.

In this paper, we study the ergodicity of the geodesic flows on surfaces with no focal points. Let M be a smooth connected and closed surface equipped with a $C^{\infty }$ Riemannian metric g, whose genus $\mathfrak {g} \geq 2$. Suppose that $(M,g)$ has no focal points. We prove that the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of M is ergodic with respect to the Liouville measure, under the assumption that the set of points on M with negative curvature has at most finitely many connected components.

We present a Markov chain example where non-reversibility and an added edge jointly improve mixing time. When a random edge is added to a cycle of n vertices and a Markov chain with a drift is introduced, we get a mixing time of $O(n^{3/2})$ with probability bounded away from 0. If only one of the two modifications were performed, the mixing time would stay $\Omega(n^2)$ .

We use Gaussian measure-preserving systems to prove the existence and genericity of Lebesgue measure-preserving transformations $T:[0,1]\rightarrow [0,1]$ which exhibit both mixing and rigidity behavior along families of asymptotically linearly independent sequences. Let $\unicode{x3bb} _1,\ldots ,\unicode{x3bb} _N\in [0,1]$ and let $\phi _1,\ldots ,\phi _N:\mathbb N\rightarrow \mathbb Z$ be asymptotically linearly independent (that is, for any $(a_1,\ldots ,a_N)\in \mathbb Z^N\setminus \{\vec 0\}$, $\lim _{k\rightarrow \infty }|\sum _{j=1}^Na_j\phi _j(k)|=\infty $). Then the class of invertible Lebesgue measure-preserving transformations $T:[0,1]\rightarrow [0,1]$ for which there exists a sequence $(n_k)_{k\in \mathbb {N}}$ in $\mathbb {N}$ with for any measurable $A,B\subseteq [0,1]$ and any $j\in \{1,\ldots ,N\}$, is generic. This result is a refinement of a result due to Stëpin (Theorem 2 in [Spectral properties of generic dynamical systems. Math. USSR-Izv. 29(1) (1987), 159–192]) and a generalization of a result due to Bergelson, Kasjan, and Lemańczyk (Corollary F in [Polynomial actions of unitary operators and idempotent ultrafilters. Preprint, 2014, arXiv:1401.7869]).

An ergodic dynamical system $\mathbf {X}$ is called dominant if it is isomorphic to a generic extension of itself. It was shown by Glasner et al [On some generic classes of ergodic measure preserving transformations. Trans. Moscow Math. Soc. 82(1) (2021), 15–36] that Bernoulli systems with finite entropy are dominant. In this work, we show first that every ergodic system with positive entropy is dominant, and then that if $\mathbf {X}$ has zero entropy, then it is not dominant.