Möbius disjointness for skew products
Abstract.
We show that for , every skew product on over a rotation of satisfies Sarnak’s conjecture. This is an improvement of earlier results of Kułaga-Przymus-Lemańczyk, Huang-Wang-Ye, and Kanigowski-Lemańczyk-Radziwiłł.
1. Introduction
Let be a compact metric space and be a homeomorphism. If the topological dynamical system has (topological) entropy zero, then Sarnak’s conjecture [27, 26] predicts that
for any continuous and every . When this holds, we say that the system is Möbius disjoint.
Sarnak’s conjecture has been proved for a variety of dynamical systems: see for instance [2, 3, 14, 7, 10, 8, 15, 24, 22, 25, 4]. A common feature of all the results listed is that the underlying system is regular, in the sense that for every the sequence converges in the weak-* topology to some -invariant Borel probability measure on .
Let denote the circle. In this paper we will deal with the so-called Anzai skew products , where , is a continuous map and the transformation is given by
for all . We often denote the system simply by .
Observe that is distal, so it has zero topological entropy and therefore we expect it to be Möbius disjoint. In fact, these skew products are the basic building blocks in Furstenberg’s classification of minimal distal flows [12], so understanding them is the first step towards establishing Sarnak’s conjecture for this important general case. The main novel dynamical challenge that arises when one deals with skew products is that they provide some of the simplest examples of irregular dynamics. Indeed, Furstenberg [11] showed that is not regular for some and some analytic .
Lifting to the real line, we can write for all , where is the topological degree of and is a continuous -periodic function, unique up to shifts by (we fix an arbitrary choice). Kułaga-Przymus and Lemańczyk [19] have shown that if for some then is Möbius disjoint for a topologically generic set of . Furthermore, they proved Möbius disjointness of when , assuming only continuity of [19, Proposition 2.3.1], so from now on we assume . A further consequence of their work [19, Remark 2.5.7] (see also [28, Corollary 2.6]) is that if is assumed to be Lipschitz continuous, then Sarnak’s conjecture holds for whenever . Therefore, with the underlying assumption on in mind, we can deal only with topological degree zero from now on, and with an abuse of notation we identify with .
The first Möbius disjointness result for all was established by Liu and Sarnak [21], who proved it for analytic and satisfying the technical condition for some . This was the first time Sarnak’s conjecture was proved for a system that is not regular (since Furstenberg’s example satisfies the condition). A refinement of this result was recently obtained by Wang [28], who removed the need for a lower bound on Fourier coefficients, obtaining Möbius disjointness of for all analytic . Huang, Wang, and Ye [17] later improved this to cover all . Finally, using the work of Matomäki and Radziwiłł [23] on the behavior of in short intervals, Kanigowski, Lemańczyk, and Radziwiłł [18] established Möbius disjointness of for all subject to the condition , where is arbitrary.
Our main result is a simultaneous improvement of the works of Kułaga-Przymus-Lemańczyk [19], Huang-Wang-Ye [17], and Kanigowski-Lemańczyk-Radziwiłł [18]:
Theorem 1.
Let . For any and of class , the skew product is Möbius disjoint.
The proof follows the ideas laid out by Kanigowski-Lemańczyk-Radziwiłł in [18], but instead of aiming for a polynomial rate of convergence for in the uniform norm (along some unbounded sequence ), we establish a polynomial rate of convergence for in the norm, for each -invariant Borel probability measure . The difficulties in dealing with every such are overcome because they all project to the Lebesgue measure in the first coordinate. We also remove the condition present in [18] by slightly modifying their choice of the sequence .
Another important ingredient is better control of some sums related to the Fourier coefficients of , where the Diophantine properties of play an important role. The idea here is that not many ’s at a given scale can make small (i.e. be denominators of good rational approximations of ). Furthermore, the ’s at a given scale that give rise to rational approximations of similar quality must be somewhat well-spaced. We apply the Denjoy-Koksma inequality to appropriately chosen functions in order to extract that information (see Section 3).
The smoothness exponent seems to be the limit of this argument. Indeed, we prove in Section 5 that if one only assumes that then, at least along the sequence of best rational approximations of the irrational , the rate of rigidity of can be logarithmic even when .
In Section 6 we show that our ideas can be used to extend some general rigidity results so far only known for functions of mean zero to the general case. A modification of Lemma 1 to obtain uniform polynomial rates of rigidity in the case is also discussed.
Finally, in Section 7 we use our argument to deduce new Möbius disjointness results for flows in and Rokhlin extensions.
Notations
For a topological dynamical system , let be the set of -invariant Borel probability measures on . Write for the distance to the nearest integer (which we use as the metric in ), for the product metric in , corresponding to in each coordinate, and for the usual norm with respect to a measure . We also abbreviate and use the asymptotic notation (respectively ) to mean that there exists absolute (respectively depending only on the parameter ) such that for all in the relevant range. Furthermore, means .
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my PhD advisor, Maksym Radziwiłł, for introducing me to this problem and for general advice and encouragement. Thanks also to Adam Kanigowski and Mariusz Lemańczyk for pointing out a nice simplification to my initial proofs of Lemmas 2 and 3, and for providing valuable comments and references. I’m grateful to the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) for their 2018 workshop on “Sarnak’s Conjecture”, which played a role in motivating this work.
2. Reduction of Theorem 1 to a rigidity result
As previously outlined, we can assume that and , so can be realized as a function from to of class , which by an abuse of notation we still denote by . Observe that is in particular Lipschitz continuous, so we have pointwise convergence of its Fourier series, and the smoothness condition gives
(1) |
Lemma 1.
Let and . If is of class , then there exists an unbounded sequence of positive integers such that
for any , where the implied constant does not depend on .
Proof of Theorem 1:.
Let be the sequence from Lemma 1. For any , continuous , and , the triangle inequality and the -invariance of imply
(2) |
If is also Lipschitz continuous, then using Lemma 1 we get
(3) |
Therefore, (2) and (3) together give
for every , which is precisely the PR rigidity condition of [18] (using the linearly dense family of Lipschitz continuous functions) for the system , so [18, Theorem 1.1] implies Möbius disjointness for this skew product, and Theorem 1 is proved.
∎
3. Continued fractions and some arithmetic estimates
Before proceeding to the proof of Lemma 1, we recall some properties of continued fractions. Let , with and , be the -th convergent of the continued fraction expansion of the irrational , so that for . Then:
-
(P1)
, and for ;
-
(P2)
;
-
(P3)
If , then .
The main technical tool that allows us to quickly explore the Diophantine properties of through its continued fraction is the following inequality:
Proposition 1 (Denjoy-Koksma inequality).
Let . If is of bounded variation, which we denote by , then for any and we have
The next two lemmas encapsulate estimates related to continued fractions that will be necessary to prove Lemma 1.
Lemma 2.
For any and ,
Proof of Lemma 2:.
The lower bound comes from positivity and the single term , by (P2). The upper bound follows from [1, Lemma 2.5] (see also [20, Lemma 1] for a partial result). We give a quick proof for completeness.
Assume , as the sum over negative is the same. Consider given by
Observe that by (P2) and (P3), for all , so by the Denjoy-Koksma inequality we conclude that
as desired.
∎
Lemma 3.
For any , , and ,
4. Polynomial rate of rigidity in : the proof of Lemma 1
At last, we are ready to prove our main lemma.
Proof of Lemma 1:.
Denoting , we have
so that
Therefore,
(4) |
Consider the projection map . Observe that the integrand in (4) is independent of the second coordinate, so we can rewrite the integral as
(5) |
Since is a map of topological dynamical systems (where in the image the transformation is ) and is -invariant, the Borel probability measure is -invariant. But is irrational, so is uniquely ergodic and we conclude that is the Lebesgue measure on .
Using the Fourier expansion of we get , where . A computation shows that
for and , so we can plug this into (5) and conclude, using the triangle inequality and replacing by absolute values, that the integral there is bounded by a constant multiple of
(6) |
where we have used Parseval for .
Now, we make a preliminary choice of the sequence by letting , where is the denominator of the -th convergent of the continued fraction expansion of , as before, and is chosen so that
where . Such exist for all , by the Dirichlet approximation theorem.
Let . In what follows it is worth keeping in mind the rough hierarchy “” behind our choice of parameters. We wish to show that . With our choice of the first term in the RHS of (4) contributes at most
(7) |
so it is harmless. The first term of (6) contributes
(8) |
and it is also harmless.
We break the remaining terms into two parts, corresponding to and . Observe that and . Furthermore, by a trivial bound, so
(9) |
where we have used (1), Lemma 3 (for ) and the fact that by (P1), so the grow exponentially.
It remains to deal with . In this case, we use and , so those terms contribute
(10) |
To deal with the sum over we consider two cases:
∎
5. Counterexample to polynomial rate of rigidity in
Lemma 1 raises the question of how low one can push the smoothness of and still have a polynomial rate of rigidity for . We show that, at least along the sequence of denominators of best rational approximations for an irrational , there is with such that
for every , unlike what happens for with (observe that in that case works in Lemma 1).
Indeed, let and choose given by
where will be chosen to be sufficiently large. Since by (P1), is absolutely convergent and therefore . Take large enough so that . By the Denjoy-Koksma inequality, we have
for every . Since we conclude that , so that for all . Therefore, the beginning of the proof of Lemma 1 shows that
(12) |
If then , so
If instead then from (by (P2)) we get . Since we have , so , and in conclusion
Taking respectively the terms corresponding to and in (12) and using positivity of the other terms we conclude that the whole expression is , so there is no polynomial rate of convergence to zero along any subsequence of . In fact, [18, Lemma 3.2] shows that a decay of the form for any would be enough for Möbius disjointness, but that too is false by our counterexample.
6. Extension of general rigidity results to of non-zero mean
Recall that a topological dynamical system is called rigid if for each there exists a sequence of positive integers such that in for all .
By theorems of Herman [16, XIII.4.8] and Gabriel, Lemańczyk, and Liardet [13, Théorème 1.1], if and is absolutely continuous, has topological degree zero, and satisfies , then the skew product is rigid, and in fact they show that uniformly by obtaining
Lemańczyk and Mauduit [20, Theorem 1] (see also [1, Corollary 2.8]) generalized111If is absolutely continuous then , so the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma gives . these theorems to show rigidity (though not uniformly) of for all and (of topological degree zero) satisfying and .
The techniques of this paper may be employed to extend both results to cover the case . Furthermore, in the case we can modify Lemma 1 to recover a uniform polynomial rate of rigidity instead of just the result in presented previously.
6.1. Uniform rigidity for absolutely continuous
Proposition 2.
If and is absolutely continuous of topological degree zero, then the skew product is uniformly rigid.
Proof of Proposition 2:.
We can simply use the original result for the zero mean case to conclude that there is as such that
so choose with
using Dirichlet’s approximation theorem to get
uniformly in . Therefore, is uniformly rigid along the sequence .
∎
6.2. Rigidity for with tamely decaying Fourier coefficients
Proposition 3.
If and (of topological degree zero) satisfies , then the skew product is rigid.
Proof of Proposition 3 (Sketch):.
We have the Fourier expansion222It follows from the conditions that . (in )
where satisfies as and for technical reasons we can of course also assume that it is non-decreasing and does not grow too fast, say .
With the conditions above, we can show that there is a sequence of positive integers such that
for any .
The proof is a simple modification of the proof of Lemma 1, substituting with , so for instance is chosen so that
Observe that we do not have multiplicativity of , which is why the bound is not of the form , but it is enough to prove that is rigid333The bound implies rigidity for since the Lipschitz continuous functions on are dense in , for any . This follows by the Stone-Weierstrass theorem and the fact that is dense in , since is a Radon measure – see for instance [9, Proposition 7.9]. (the latter bound could be obtained if we imposed extra attainable conditions on ).
∎
6.3. Uniform polynomial rate of rigidity for
Finally, we point out that the conclusion of Lemma 1 can actually be strengthened to a uniform polynomial rate of rigidity:
Proposition 4.
Let and . If is of class , then there exists an unbounded sequence of positive integers such that
Proof of Proposition 4 (Sketch):.
We start by substantially modifying the results of Lemma 2 and Lemma 3. Namely one can show, using the same techniques as in the corresponding results of Section 3 but this time for the functions
respectively, that if , , , and then
(13) |
and
(14) |
Then expanding into a Fourier series and trivially bounding it we get
so we can proceed as in the proof of Lemma 1 with the expression above corresponding to (6) and the bounds of (13) and (14) corresponding to Lemma 2 and Lemma 3, respectively, to get the desired uniform polynomial decay.
∎
Remark 1.
The proof actually shows that for every of class and of mean zero,
(15) |
since in that case we can take throughout the argument.
Remark 2.
Even though Proposition 4 gives a stronger result than Lemma 1, we chose to emphasize the latter in our presentation because the methods employed there seem more suitable for generalization (and the proof is slightly more complicated). For instance, an approach to Proposition 3 using methods would already be frustrated by the presence of the extra logarithmic factor in (13), if the decay of the Fourier coefficients is sufficiently slow. Therefore, the use of methods seems to allow us to go a bit further.
7. Smooth flows on and Rokhlin extensions
We can adapt the result of this paper, following [18], to give Möbius disjointness for new cases of smooth flows on the torus and Rokhlin extensions.
7.1. Smooth flows on
For , let be a strictly positive continuous function. Let
where denotes the equivalence relation in and is the irrational rotation by . We can define a special flow over with roof function , which acts on by
for all . More explicitly, if we extend a previous definition to
then
for all , where is such that
which exists and is unique as is continuous and strictly positive.
Every sufficiently smooth area-preserving flow on with no fixed points or closed orbits can be represented by such a special flow for with corresponding smoothness properties (see [6]).
We have the following consequence of our work:
Corollary 1.
Let and . If then all the maps of the special flow over the irrational rotation are Möbius disjoint.
Proof of Corollary 1:.
There is a natural quotient metric making a compact metric space (see [5, Appendix 9.1]), and it satisfies
(16) |
Denote and let be the denominators of convergents of the continued fraction of , as before. For a fixed , let be such that
where will be chosen later to be sufficiently small ( exists by Dirichlet’s approximation theorem). Then there is such that
(17) |
and
(18) |
For every we have
where we have used (16), (17) and (18). Choosing and using (15) (we could also take the norm and use the proof of Lemma 1) we get the bound , which gives a polynomial rate of rigidity for along the (unbounded, unless ) sequence , and this implies Möbius disjointness for .
∎
7.2. Rokhlin extensions
As before, let and let denote the irrational rotation by . Given a continuous function , a compact metric space and a continuous flow acting on , we can define a Rokhlin extension of , acting on by
for all (observe that if and is the linear flow we recover the Anzai skew product ). We have the following disjointness result in this case:
Corollary 2.
Let . If has mean zero and the flow is uniformly Lipschitz continuous in , then is Möbius disjoint.
Proof of Corollary 2:.
If denotes the product metric in then
where the implied constant does not depend on . Using (15) we get a polynomial rate of rigidity for along (we could also take the norm and use the proof of Lemma 1), so the corollary follows.
∎
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