We study a skew product transformation associated to an irrational rotation of the circle $[0,1]/\sim $. This skew product keeps track of the number of times an orbit of the rotation lands in the two complementary intervals of $\{0,1/2\}$ in the circle. We show that under certain conditions on the continued fraction expansion of the irrational number defining the rotation, the skew product transformation has certain dense orbits. This is in spite of the presence of numerous non-dense orbits. We use this to construct laminations on infinite type surfaces with exotic properties. In particular, we show that for every infinite type surface with an isolated planar end, there is an infinite clique of $2$-filling rays based at that end. These $2$-filling rays are relevant to Bavard and Walker’s loop graphs.

Let $f,g$ be $C^2$ expanding maps on the circle which are topologically conjugate. We assume that the derivatives of f and g at corresponding periodic points coincide for some large period N. We show that f and g are ‘approximately smoothly conjugate.’ Namely, we construct a $C^2$ conjugacy $h_N$ such that $h_N$ is exponentially close to h in the $C^0$ topology, and $f_N:=h_N^{-1}gh_N$ is exponentially close to f in the $C^1$ topology. Our main tool is a uniform effective version of Bowen’s equidistribution of weighted periodic orbits to the equilibrium state.

We show that, generically, the unique invariant measure of a sufficiently regular piecewise smooth circle homeomorphism with irrational rotation number and zero mean nonlinearity (e.g. piecewise linear) has zero Hausdorff dimension. To encode this generic condition, we consider piecewise smooth homeomorphisms as generalized interval exchange transformations (GIETs) of the interval and rely on the notion of combinatorial rotation number for GIETs, which can be seen as an extension of the classical notion of rotation number for circle homeomorphisms to the GIET setting.

For integers a and $b\geq 2$, let $T_a$ and $T_b$ be multiplication by a and b on $\mathbb {T}=\mathbb {R}/\mathbb {Z}$. The action on $\mathbb {T}$ by $T_a$ and $T_b$ is called $\times a,\times b$ action and it is known that, if a and b are multiplicatively independent, then the only $\times a,\times b$ invariant and ergodic measure with positive entropy of $T_a$ or $T_b$ is the Lebesgue measure. However, it is not known whether there exists a non-trivial $\times a,\times b$ invariant and ergodic measure. In this paper, we study the empirical measures of $x\in \mathbb {T}$ with respect to the $\times a,\times b$ action and show that the set of x such that the empirical measures of x do not converge to any measure has Hausdorff dimension one and the set of x such that the empirical measures can approach a non-trivial $\times a,\times b$ invariant measure has Hausdorff dimension zero. Furthermore, we obtain some equidistribution result about the $\times a,\times b$ orbit of x in the complement of a set of Hausdorff dimension zero.

We study stationary measures for iterated function systems (considered as random dynamical systems) consisting of two piecewise affine interval homeomorphisms, called Alsedà–Misiurewicz (AM) systems. We prove that for an open set of parameters, the unique non-atomic stationary measure for an AM system has Hausdorff dimension strictly smaller than $1$. In particular, we obtain singularity of these measures, answering partially a question of Alsedà and Misiurewicz [Random interval homeomorphisms. Publ. Mat. 58(suppl.) (2014), 15–36].

Inspired by a twist map theorem of Mather. we study recurrent invariant sets that are ordered like rigid rotation under the action of the lift of a bimodal circle map g to the k-fold cover. For each irrational in the rotation set’s interior, the collection of the k-fold ordered semi-Denjoy minimal sets with that rotation number contains a $(k-1)$-dimensional ball with the weak topology on their unique invariant measures. We also describe completely their periodic orbit analogs for rational rotation numbers. The main tool used is a generalization of a construction of Hedlund and Morse that generates symbolic analogs of these k-fold well-ordered invariant sets.

A left orderable monster is a finitely generated left orderable group all of whose fixed point-free actions on the line are proximal: the action is semiconjugate to a minimal action so that for every bounded interval I and open interval J, there is a group element that sends I into J. In his 2018 ICM address, Navas asked about the existence of left orderable monsters. By now there are several examples, all of which are finitely generated but not finitely presentable. We provide the first examples of left orderable monsters that are finitely presentable, and even of type $F_\infty $. These groups satisfy several additional properties separating them from the previous examples: they are not simple, they act minimally on the circle, and they have an infinite-dimensional space of homogeneous quasimorphisms. Our construction is flexible enough that it produces infinitely many isomorphism classes of finitely presented (and type $F_{\infty }$) left orderable monsters.

For the family of double standard maps $f_{a,b}=2x+a+({b}/{\pi }) \sin 2\pi x \pmod {1}$ we investigate the structure of the space of parameters a when $b=1$ and when $b\in [0,1)$. In the first case the maps have a critical point, but for a set of parameters $E_1$ of positive Lebesgue measure there is an invariant absolutely continuous measure for $f_{a,1}$. In the second case there is an open non-empty set $E_b$ of parameters for which the map $f_{a,b}$ is expanding. We show that as $b\nearrow 1$, the set $E_b$ accumulates on many points of $E_1$ in a regular way from the measure point of view.

In this short and elementary note, we study some ergodic optimization problems for circle expanding maps. We first make an observation that if a function is not far from being convex, then its calibrated sub-actions are closer to convex functions in a certain effective way. As an application of this simple observation, for a circle doubling map, we generalize a result of Bousch saying that translations of the cosine function are uniquely optimized by Sturmian measures. Our argument follows the mainline of Bousch’s original proof, while some technical part is simplified by the observation mentioned above, and no numerical calculation is needed.

The two main results in this paper concern the regularity of the invariant foliation of a $C^0$ -integrable symplectic twist diffeomorphism of the two-dimensional annulus, namely that (i) the generating function of such a foliation is $C^1$ , and (ii) the foliation is Hölder with exponent $\tfrac 12$ . We also characterize foliations by graphs that are straightenable via a symplectic homeomorphism and prove that every symplectic homeomorphism that leaves invariant all the leaves of a straightenable foliation has Arnol’d–Liouville coordinates, in which the dynamics restricted to the leaves is conjugate to a rotation. We deduce that every Lipschitz integrable symplectic twist diffeomorphisms of the two-dimensional annulus has Arnol’d–Liouville coordinates and then provide examples of ‘strange’ Lipschitz foliations by smooth curves that cannot be straightened by a symplectic homeomorphism and cannot be invariant by a symplectic twist diffeomorphism.

We construct a $C^1$ symplectic twist map g of the annulus that has an essential invariant curve $\Gamma $ such that $\Gamma $ is not differentiable and g restricted to $\Gamma $ is minimal.

In this paper we show that generic continuous Lebesgue measure-preserving circle maps have the s-limit shadowing property. In addition, we obtain that s-limit shadowing is a generic property also for continuous circle maps. In particular, this implies that classical shadowing, periodic shadowing and limit shadowing are generic in these two settings as well.

Two given orbits of a minimal circle homeomorphism f are said to be geometrically equivalent if there exists a quasisymmetric circle homeomorphism identifying both orbits and commuting with f. By a well-known theorem due to Herman and Yoccoz, if f is a smooth diffeomorphism with Diophantine rotation number, then any two orbits are geometrically equivalent. It follows from the a priori bounds of Herman and Świątek, that the same holds if f is a critical circle map with rotation number of bounded type. By contrast, we prove in the present paper that if f is a critical circle map whose rotation number belongs to a certain full Lebesgue measure set in $(0,1)$ , then the number of equivalence classes is uncountable (Theorem 1.1). The proof of this result relies on the ergodicity of a two-dimensional skew product over the Gauss map. As a by-product of our techniques, we construct topological conjugacies between multicritical circle maps which are not quasisymmetric, and we show that this phenomenon is abundant, both from the topological and measure-theoretical viewpoints (Theorems 1.6 and 1.8).

A gap mapping is a discontinuous interval mapping with two strictly increasing branches that have a gap between their ranges. They are one-dimensional dynamical systems, which arise in the study of certain higher dimensional flows, for example the Lorenz flow and the Cherry flow. In this paper, we prove hyperbolicity of renormalization acting on $C^3$ dissipative gap mappings, and show that the topological conjugacy classes of infinitely renormalizable gap mappings are $C^1$ manifolds.

In this paper we prove a local exponential synchronization for Markovian random iterations of homeomorphisms of the circle $S^{1}$ , providing a new result on stochastic circle dynamics even for $C^1$ -diffeomorphisms. This result is obtained by combining an invariance principle for stationary random iterations of homeomorphisms of the circle with a Krylov–Bogolyubov-type result for homogeneous Markov chains.

We consider products of an independent and identically distributed sequence in a set $\{f_1,\ldots ,f_m\}$ of orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms of the circle. We can naturally associate a Lyapunov exponent $\lambda $ . Under few assumptions, it is known that $\lambda \leq 0$ and that the equality holds if and only if $f_1,\ldots ,f_m$ are simultaneously conjugated to rotations. In this paper, we state a quantitative version of this fact in the case where $f_1,\ldots ,f_m$ are $C^k$ perturbations of rotations with rotation numbers $\rho (f_1),\ldots ,\rho (f_m)$ satisfying a simultaneous diophantine condition in the sense of Moser [On commuting circle mappings and simultaneous diophantine approximations. Math. Z.205(1) (1990), 105–121]: we give a precise estimate of $\lambda $ (Taylor expansion) and we prove that there exist a diffeomorphism g and rotations $r_i$ such that $\mbox {dist}(gf_ig^{-1},r_i)\ll |\lambda |^{{1}/{2}}$ for $i=1,\ldots , m$ . We also state analogous results for random products of $2\times 2$ matrices, without any diophantine condition.

Given a closed, orientable, compact surface S of constant negative curvature and genus $g \geq 2$ , we study the measure-theoretic entropy of the Bowen–Series boundary map with respect to its smooth invariant measure. We obtain an explicit formula for the entropy that only depends on the perimeter of the $(8g-4)$ -sided fundamental polygon of the surface S and its genus. Using this, we analyze how the entropy changes in the Teichmüller space of S and prove the following flexibility result: the measure-theoretic entropy takes all values between 0 and a maximum that is achieved on the surface that admits a regular $(8g-4)$ -sided fundamental polygon. We also compare the measure-theoretic entropy to the topological entropy of these maps and show that the smooth invariant measure is not a measure of maximal entropy.

We provide a complete characterization of periodic point free homeomorphisms of the $2$ -torus admitting irrational circle rotations as topological factors. Given a homeomorphism of the $2$ -torus without periodic points and exhibiting uniformly bounded rotational deviations with respect to a rational direction, we show that annularity and the geometry of its non-wandering set are the only possible obstructions for the existence of an irrational circle rotation as topological factor. Through a very precise study of the dynamics of the induced $\rho $ -centralized skew-product, we extend and generalize considerably previous results of Jäger.

Let f be a germ of a holomorphic diffeomorphism with an irrationally indifferent fixed point at the origin in ${\mathbb C}$ (i.e. $f(0) = 0, f'(0) = e^{2\pi i \alpha }, \alpha \in {\mathbb R} - {\mathbb Q}$ ). Pérez-Marco [Fixed points and circle maps. Acta Math.179(2) (1997), 243–294] showed the existence of a unique continuous monotone one-parameter family of non-trivial invariant full continua containing the fixed point called Siegel compacta, and gave a correspondence between germs and families $(g_t)$ of circle maps obtained by conformally mapping the complement of these compacts to the complement of the unit disk. The family of circle maps $(g_t)$ is the orbit of a locally defined semigroup $(\Phi _t)$ on the space of analytic circle maps, which we show has a well-defined infinitesimal generator X. The explicit form of X is obtained by using the Loewner equation associated to the family of hulls $(K_t)$ . We show that the Loewner measures $(\mu _t)$ driving the equation are 2-conformal measures on the circle for the circle maps $(g_t)$ .

Let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ denote the mapping class group of the plane minus a Cantor set. We show that every action of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ on the circle is either trivial or semiconjugate to a unique minimal action on the so-called simple circle.