Low complexity of optimizing measures over an expanding circle map
Abstract.
In this paper, we prove that for real analytic expanding circle maps, all optimizing measures of a real analytic potential function have zero entropy, unless the potential is cohomologous to constant. We use the group structure of the symbolic space to solve a transversality problem involved. We also discuss applications to optimizing measures for generic smooth potentials and to Lyapunov optimizing measures.
1. Introduction
Given a continuous map from a compact metric space into itself and a continuous function , the problem of ergodic optimization looks for maximization/minimization of , where runs over the collection of all -invariant Borel probability measures. Let
(1) |
By Birkhoff’s Ergodic Theorem, these quantities also optimize the time average of along orbits.
A measure is called a maximizing measure if and an orbit is called a maximizing orbit if Minimizing measures/orbits are similarly defined. As , the problems of maximization and minimization are equivalent. In this paper, we shall mainly discuss the maximizing problem.
Numerical experiments by Hunt-Ott in [11, 12] indicate that typically maximizing orbits are periodic and maximizing measures are supported on periodic orbits or at least of zero entropy. The mathematical theory of ergodic optimization has been developed since then, mainly in the case that is hyperbolic. Yuan-Hunt [23] dealt with the case that is either an Axiom A diffeomorphism or a non-invertible uniformly expanding map, and is Lipschitz, and proved that only periodic orbits (measures) can be persistently maximal in the Lipschitz topology. Building upon [23, 5, 19, 21], Contreras [6] proved that for uniformly expanding, a generic has a unique maximizing measure which is supported on a periodic orbit in the Lipschitz topology. Recently, Huang et al [9] extended the results and proved that when is either uniformly expanding or Axiom A, for a generic in the topology, the maximizing measure is unique and supported on a periodic orbit. However, just as in many other circumstances in the state-of-the-art theory of dynamical systems, the local perturbation technique is tied to the (or coarser) topology.
The simplest uniformly expanding maps are probably the maps , with . This case has received much attention. When , for , , Bousch [2] proved that the maximizing measure of is unique and is a Sturmian measure which, in particular, has entropy zero. See [14, 15, 8] for similar results in this direction.
The goal of this paper is to prove the following theorem.
Main Theorem.
Let be a real analytic expanding map and let be a real analytic function. Then
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either is real analytically cohomologous to constant, i.e. there exists a real analytic function and a constant such that ;
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•
or any optimizing measure of is of zero entropy.
In particular, the Main Theorem gives a complete solution to a problem raised by O. Jenkinson, see [13, Problem 3.12], which was also mentioned in [1, page 1847].
Morris [19] proved that for generic Hölder or Lipschitz functions, there is a unique maximizing measure and this measure has entropy zero. This result played an important role in the work [6] cited above which proves the outstanding TPO conjecture (TPO means “typically maximizing measures are supported on a periodic orbit”) in the Lipschitz topology. Our Main Theorem implies that Morris’ result remains true for functions for any , see Theorem 1.2. It is our hope that our Main Theorem will throw some insight in proving the TPO conjecture in topology with in the case that the underlying dynamics is an expanding circle map.
One of the key ingredients in our proof is a transversality result. To reduce the technicality, we shall only state a special version that is needed for the proof of the Main Theorem here. See Theorem 2.1 for the general statement. Let and be as in the Main Theorem. We assume that is orientation preserving and that fixes . Let denote the unique lift of with , via the natural projection . Let and for each . Let . Let . For each consider
which is well-defined and real analytic on .
Theorem 1.1 (Transversality).
Under the above circumstances, we have
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either is real analytically cohomologous to constant and holds for all ;
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or holds whenever and .
We prove this theorem using the odometer structure of the space . An important observation is that is a closed subgroup of , where denotes the element of whose entries are all . When is prime, this immediately implies that either or . The same conclusion remains true for an arbitrary integer which will be dealt with by Fourier analysis. See Proposition 2.3. Note that this kind of transversality problem appears naturally in the study of skew product over circle expanding maps. In particular, a special case of this type of dichotomy was obtained in [22, Theorem A] using a different method, which represents an important step in the study of a dimension dichotomy for the graphs of Weierstrass-type functions. The method here provides a much more general result with simpler proofs.
Let us explain how Theorem 1.1 is used in the proof of the Main Theorem. Assume that is not real analytically cohomologous to a constant. Then the second alternative of Theorem 1.1 holds. By ergodic decomposition, we only need to show that any ergodic maximizing measure has zero entropy. Let denote the support of , We may assume that and so that can be identified naturally with a compact subset of . The space of inverse orbits in is naturally identified with
With the help of a sub-action, we deduce from Theorem 1.1 that if the section
has a limit point , then belongs to a set which has at most two elements and which is uniquely determined by , see Proposition 3.2. (It is here that we need real analyticity of and .) This enables us to apply well-known results in dimension theory of dynamical systems (for example [18]) to conclude that has entropy zero.
Now we state a few corollaries of the Main Theorem.
Theorem 1.2.
Let be expanding and real analytic. Let . Then for generic , any optimizing measure of is of zero entropy.
As mentioned before, Morris [19] proved a similar result for Hölder and Lipschitz functions, using a result of Bressaud and Quas [5]. Our argument is based on our Main Theorem and the fact that functions can be approximated by real analytic ones. It is worthy noting that the case is particularly special, as generically, the unique optimizing measure is fully supported but has zero entropy, see [3, 17, 4].
The special case is often referred to as Lyapunov optimization, see [7]. Our result has the following consequences.
Theorem 1.3.
Let be expanding and real analytic. Then
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either there exists a real analytic diffeomorphism such that ;
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or any Lyapunov optimizing measure of is of zero entropy.
For , let denote the collection of maps from to itself, endowed with the topology. Let be the open subset of consisting of expanding maps on .
Theorem 1.4.
Let . For generic , any Lyapunov optimizing measure of is of zero entropy.
In [10], it is proved that for generic , a Lyapunov optimizing measure is supported on a periodic orbit. See [7, 17] for earlier results on and cases respectively.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In § 2, we prove Theorem 1.1 and a more general transversality result; in § 3, we prove the Main Theorem; in § 4, we prove Theorems 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4.
Acknowledgment. RG would like to thank Bing Gao and Zeng Lian for helpful discussions. We would also like to thank Jairo Bochi for reading a first version of the paper and several useful remarks. WS is supported by NSFC grant No. 11731003.
2. A transversality result
In this section, we state and prove a more general version of Theorem 1.1. The proof exploits the structure of as a compact abelian group.
2.1. Statement of result
We start with the statement of the general transversality result. Let be a orientation-preserving expanding map with and let be the degree. Let be a function for some . As before, denote by the lift of with , and . Given , for any , denote:
Let . 111By [20, Theorem A.3], , where is as in (1). Note that for any , there exists such that
Fix a such that . Then, for each ,
is a well-defined continuous function from to , where and is the natural projection. The following theorem is our main transversality result.
Theorem 2.1.
Under the circumstances above, the following are equivalent:
-
(i)
there exist with ;
-
(ii)
for any ;
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(iii)
is -periodic;
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(iv)
is -periodic and ;
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(v)
there exists a function such that .
Proof of Theorem 1.1 assuming Theorem 2.1.
Assume that the second alternative in the conclusion of Theorem 1.1 does not hold. Then (i) and hence (ii)-(v) all hold in Theorem 2.1 (for ). By (iv), is real analytically cohomologous to constant since is real analytic. By (ii), for all . Thus the first alternative in the conclusion of Theorem 1.1 holds. ∎
2.2. Group structure of
Let us recall the well-known structure of as a compact abelian group. The topology on is the product topology of the discrete topology on . The space becomes a compact abelian group with addition defined as follows. For , is the unique element such that for each ,
Note that the semi-group can be naturally embedded into as a dense sub-semi-group in the following way:
In particular, is the zero element of . The map is usually called a (-adic) adding machine.
The following lemma is a simple observation which plays an important role in our proof.
Lemma 2.2.
Given , if and only if . As a result, is a closed subgroup of .
Proof.
Since is a group, we only need to prove the “only if” part. By definition, for each positive integer ,
Since is of period , it follows that for , we have:
In particular,
Since is dense in and since is continuous for any fixed , it follows that implies that .
In particular, is a subgroup of . Its closedness follows from the fact that is continuous for each . ∎
Proposition 2.3.
Under the circumstances of Theorem 2.1, (i) implies (iii).
The proof of this proposition will be given in the next subsection, using Fourier analysis. Here we give a short proof in the case that is a prime.
Proof of Proposition 2.3 assuming that is a prime.
It suffices to prove that , because means that is -periodic. Since (i) holds, by Lemma 2.2, is a non-trivial closed subgroup of . For each ,
is a subgroup of the cyclic group . Since the group also has the following property:
is non-trivial for each . Since is prime, there exists a unique such that is generated by . In particular, . Since induces a surjective homomorphism from to , is also a generator of , and thus . In conlcusion, for all . Since is closed, it follows that . ∎
2.3. Fourier analysis
The goal of this subsection is to prove Proposition 2.3.
We first describe a procedure which reduces the problem to the case that is linear. It is well-known that is topologically conjugate to the linear map via a homeomorphism with ; in particular, . Let be the lift of with . Then
which implies that
Let and let
By definition, we have the following.
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is -periodic.
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is -periodic if and only if is -periodic.
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if and only if .
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If , then and .
For each , consider
To prove Proposition 2.3, we shall use Fourier analysis to show that is constant for each .
The space carries a unique Borel probability measure such that for any and any Borel set ,
where denote the standard Lebesgue measure of . Moreover, there is a -preserving Borel measurable bijection defined as
where is the largest integer which is not greater than , and for .
Indeed, provides a natural identification between and the space of backward orbits of :
The map corresponds to the homeomorphism and corresponds to the lift of the -invariant Lebesgue measure on to the space . Let us note that the measure corresponds to the Haar measure on the compact abelian group , although we do not need this fact explicitly.
The following lemma describes symmetry of the functions .
Lemma 2.4.
For any ,
(2) |
Moreover, for any , we have
(3) |
Proof.
We first prove (2). Note that for each , , and , we have
where . So for ,
where the last equality follows from the fact that is -periodic and .
We shall also need the following two lemmas.
Lemma 2.5.
For , let for each . Then for any integer , there exists a positive integer such that for any ,
Proof.
Fix and let . Then is a -invariant finite set. Assuming that the conclusion fails, i.e., for all , it remains to show that . Since for all , it follows that each is a periodic point of in . Since each is eventually mapped to , it follows that for all , and hence . ∎
Lemma 2.6.
If is constant, then (or equivalently ) is -periodic.
Proof.
Let be such that . By definition, for any . Since for any , any integer and any , it follows that for any and any . In particular, for any . By (2), it follows that
By the Mean Value Theorem, , so . Thus , which completes the proof. ∎
We are ready to complete the proof of Proposition 2.3.
Completion of proof of Proposition 2.3.
Assume that (i) holds. By Lemma 2.6, it suffices to show that is constant for any . To this end, let
We shall show that for any integers , and ,
(4) |
Before the proof of (4), let us show how it implies that is constant. Note that is bounded and continuous on . Let denote the Borel -algebra of and let , which is a -algebra in . Then is monotone increasing to the Borel -algebra in . By the Martingale Convergence theorem, converges -a.e. to . Since is -measurable,
for any and , where the last equality follows from (4). Since is the standard Lebesgue measure on , each , which can be viewed as a function in , must be constant a.e.. Thus is constant -a.e.. Since is continuous, it is constant.
3. Proof of the Main Theorem
This section is devoted to the proof of the Main Theorem. The following is an equivalent reformulation of the Main Theorem.
Main Theorem’.
Let be a real analytic expanding map and let be a real analytic function. Assume that is not real analytically cohomologous to constant. Let be a maximizing measure of . Then the measure-theoretic entropy .
In §§ 3.1– 3.3, we shall prove the Main Theorem’ under the following technical condition:
where denotes the set of fixed points of . In § 3.4, we shall show how to remove this condition and complete the proof, using the equivalence of the maximization problem between and .
3.1. Strategy of the proof assuming ()
Let be the degree of . Without loss of generality, we may assume that is a fixed point of which is not contained in . As before, let be the unique lift of with and denote . Moreover, denote for . Let . Identifying with in the natural way, is a non-empty compact subset of with .
For , recall
In order to show that , we shall analyze the inverse limit of . So let
Given , denote
Note that is a non-empty compact subset in . Given , denote
Then is a compact subset of (possibly empty).
Let us apply Theorem 1.1, so that
As we are assuming that is not real analytically cohomologous to constant, the second alternative of Theorem 1.1 holds. So for distinct , the real analytic functions and are not identical, and hence has only isolated zeros. This allows us to define, for each , two total orders and on as follows.
Definition 3.1.
Given , define two total orders on as follows. Given in ,
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is strictly less than with respect to if there exists such that holds for all ;
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is strictly less than with respect to if there exists such that holds for all .
Lemma 3.1.
Suppose that is not real analytically cohomologous to constant. Then for any , has a unique maximal element , and has a unique maximal element , which define two maps .
Proof.
Uniqueness follows from the fact that both orders are total orders. For existence, let us focus on “”; the discussion on “” is totally similar and omitted. For each , since is continuous in , defined inductively below is a decreasing sequence of non-empty compact subsets of , where :
Therefore contains at least one element . Then for any , for any , which implies that is a maximal element in with respect to . ∎
We shall prove the following proposition in § 3.3.
Proposition 3.2.
Assume that has a limit point . Then
3.2. Proof of the Main Theorem’ assuming ()
Let be the inverse limit of , i.e., for ,
As , is naturally topologically conjugate to a one-sided subshift with symbols and is topologically conjugate to a two-sided subshift with symbols.
We shall need the following well-known result.
Proposition 3.3.
If is an ergodic invariant probability Borel measure of the two-sided full shift such that , then for any Borel subset of with , the following holds for -a.e. :
are both uncountable.
Proof.
It is well-known that the two-sided full shift is topologically conjugate to a linear horseshoe , with the sets in question corresponding to (local) stable and unstable manifolds. If is the -invariant ergodic probability measure corresponding to , then . It is well-known that (see e.g. [18]) for -a.e. , the conditional measures and along the local stable and unstable manifolds have positive local dimensions and thus admit no atom. So if , then for -a.e. , the intersection of with the stable and unstable manifolds of must be both uncountable. ∎
The following lemma deals with the measurability issue involved.
Lemma 3.4.
The set defined below is Borel:
Proof.
Define as (here use instead of because might be empty), where means the distance of to a subset of the real line in the usual sense. Then . It suffices to show that is Borel. In fact, the following hold.
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Given , is continuous. This is easy to check.
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Given , is Borel. To see this, for each , let
Then, by compactness of , is lower semi-continuous for each , while .
It follows that is Borel. ∎
Let us now complete the proof of the Main Theorem assuming ().
Proof of the Main Theorem’ assuming ().
Assume by contradiction that . By ergodic decomposition and affinity of the entropy function, we may assume that is ergodic with respect to . As the inverse limit of , the map has an ergodic invariant measure with positive entropy.
3.3. Complexity of
This subsection is devoted to the proof of Proposition 3.2. Let be a sub-action for , i.e., is a continuous function such that
for all . If we put
(6) |
then a -invariant measure is a maximizing measure if and only if it is supported in . In particular, .
Sub-actions played an important role in the ergodic maximization problem. When is expanding and is Lipschitz, it is well-known that there exists a sub-action which is Lipschitz. This is often referred to as Mãné’s lemma. However, in general we cannot expect higher regularity of , even when we assume and are both real analytic, see [3].
Lemma 3.5.
Let . Then for any ,
Moreover, equality holds if .
Proof.
Denote . Since is a sub-action and , for each ,
Moreover, equality holds in the last inequality if . Therefore, for each ,
Consequently,
Letting , we obtain the desired inequality.
If , then all the inequalities above become equalities. ∎
Proof of Proposition 3.2.
We may assume that there exists a sequence in converging to from the right side; the other situation is similar and omitted. We shall show that . To this end, consider an arbitrary . By Lemma 3.5, we have the following.
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Since ,
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Since ,
Therefore,
Since converges to from the right side, the inequality above implies that holds for a sequence of points converging to from the right side. It follows that cannot hold. Therefore . ∎
3.4. Iteration
We shall show that the technical condition () can be removed. Let and let . For any positive integer , let .
The following elementary observations should be well-known. Let us include a proof for completeness.
Lemma 3.6.
-
(1)
There exists such that for some if and only if the same holds for .
-
(2)
A maximizing measure of is also a maximizing measure of for any .
Proof.
(1) If , then For the other direction, suppose that for some . Then
which can be rewritten as follows:
Since is topologically transitive and since is continuous, the equality above implies that .
(2) If is a maximizing measure for , then is -invariant, and
This shows . On the other hand, if is a maximizing measure of , then is -invariant and
Hence and a maximizing measure for is also maximizing for .
∎
Completion of the proof of the Main Theorem’.
As is not analytically cohomologous to a constant, for defined by (6), , so is nowhere dense in In particular, there is a periodic point of such that . Let be an even positive integer such that . By Lemma 3.6, is a maximizing measure for and is not analytically cohomologous to a constant with respect to . Thus by what we have proved before, and hence . ∎
4. Proof of Theorems 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4
In this section, we prove Theorems 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. The basic idea is to approximate functions or maps with real analytic ones and then apply the Main Theorem.
We shall need upper semi-continuity of the following function:
(7) |
Here denote the collection of maximizing measures. This result is essentially contained in [4, 17].
Proposition 4.1.
The function is upper semi-continuous on .
Proof.
It was observed in [4] that for any fixed , is upper semi-continuous on . Indeed, if is a maximizing measure for with in , then any accumulation point of in the weak-* topology is a maximizing measure for . So the result is a consequence of upper semi-continuity of the entropy map .
Now suppose that in . By [17, Lemma 2], for each sufficiently large, there exists a homeomorphism such that , and moreover, , where is the standard metric on . Put . Then holds and in . Thus
∎
Proof of Theorem 1.2.
We only need to consider the maximizing case. Let and let . Since the inclusion map from to is continuous, according to Proposition 4.1, the function defined on is upper semi-continuous. Therefore, is a subset of . On the other hand, by our Main Theorem, , where denote the collection of functions in that are not analytically cohomologous to constant. To complete the proof, it remains to show that is dense in . To this end, let . Clearly, is a closed subset of with empty interior, and . Since is dense in , it follows that dense in , which completes the proof. ∎
We shall need the following well-known result for the proof of Theorems 1.3 and 1.4. See, for example, [7, Proposition 28] for a more comprehensive version of this result under the (and orientation-preserving) setting.
Proposition 4.2.
For each , , the following are equivalent:
-
(i)
is cohomologous to constant with respect to ;
-
(ii)
is conjugate to the linear map .
Proof.
The implication (ii) (i) is trivial. Let us show (i) (ii). Since is cohomologous to constant, there exist and such that the following hold:
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and ;
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.
The first item above implies that there exists a -diffeomorphism with . Then the second item above can be rewritten as . Integrating both sides over yields that . Therefore, is conjugate to the linear map via .
It remains to show that is when for . In this situation, admits a unique absolutely continuous invariant probability measure , which has density. On the other hand, is the unique absolutely continuous invariant probability measure of , which is exactly the standard Lebesgue measure. Thus is also . ∎
Proof of Theorem 1.3.
Let us only consider the maximizing case, i.e. , as the minimizing case is similar. By the Main Theorem, either is analytically cohomologous to constant, or any Lyapunov maximizing measure has zero entropy. If the first case happens, then by Proposition 4.2, is conjugate to . ∎
Proof of Theorem 1.4.
We only need to consider the maximizing case. Let . Since the map from to is continuous, according to Proposition 4.1, the function defined on is upper semi-continuous. Therefore, is a subset of . On the other hand, by Theorem 1.3, , where denote the collection of maps in that are not analytically conjugate to linear map. To complete the proof, it remains to show that is dense . To this end, let . Clearly, is a closed subset of with empty interior and . Since is dense in , it follows that dense in , which completes the proof. ∎
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