This paper establishes an extreme $C^k$ reducibility theorem of quasi-periodic $SL(2, \mathbb {R})$ cocycles in the local perturbative region, revealing both the essence of Eliasson [Floquet solutions for the 1-dimensional quasi-periodic Schrödinger equation. Comm. Math. Phys. 146 (1992), 447–482], and Hou and You [Almost reducibility and non-perturbative reducibility of quasi-periodic linear systems. Invent. Math. 190 (2012), 209–260] in respectively the non-resonant and resonant cases. By paralleling further the reducibility process with the almost reducibility, we are able to acquire the least initial regularity as well as the least loss of regularity for the whole Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) iterations. This, in return, makes various spectral applications of quasi-periodic Schrödinger operators wide open.

We consider continuous cocycles arising from CMV and Jacobi matrices. Assuming that the Verblunsky and Jacobi coefficients arise from generalized skew-shifts, we prove that uniform hyperbolicity of the associated cocycles is $C^0$ -dense. This implies that the associated CMV and Jacobi matrices have a Cantor spectrum for a generic continuous sampling map.

We consider Hölder continuous cocycles over an accessible partially hyperbolic system with values in the group of diffeomorphisms of a compact manifold $\mathcal {M}$ . We obtain several results for this setting. If a cocycle is bounded in $C^{1+\gamma }$ , we show that it has a continuous invariant family of $\gamma $ -Hölder Riemannian metrics on $\mathcal {M}$ . We establish continuity of a measurable conjugacy between two cocycles assuming bunching or existence of holonomies for both and pre-compactness in $C^0$ for one of them. We give conditions for existence of a continuous conjugacy between two cocycles in terms of their cycle weights. We also study the relation between the conjugacy and holonomies of the cocycles. Our results give arbitrarily small loss of regularity of the conjugacy along the fiber compared to that of the holonomies and of the cocycle.

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

This note gives a simple cocycle-theoretic proof of the Verdier hypercovering theorem. This theorem approximates morphisms $[X,\,Y]$ in the homotopy category of simplicial sheaves or presheaves by simplicial homotopy classes of maps, in the case where $Y$ is locally fibrant. The statement proved in this paper is a generalization of the standard Verdier hypercovering result in that it is pointed (in a very broad sense) and there is no requirement for the source object $X$ to be locally fibrant.