The number of ergodic measures for transitive subshifts under the regular bispecial condition

Michael Damron, Jon Fickenscher

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

If is a finite set (alphabet), the shift dynamical system consists of the space of sequences with entries in, 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 ergodic measures, where K is the limiting value of, 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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)86-140
Number of pages55
JournalErgodic Theory and Dynamical Systems
Volume42
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 29 2022

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Mathematics
  • Applied Mathematics

Keywords

  • classical ergodic theory
  • formal languages
  • symbolic dynamics

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