Posted by: matheuscmss | February 4, 2017

## Soft bounds on the Hausdorff dimension of dynamical Cantor sets

Many problems in several areas of Mathematics (including Dynamical Systems and Number Theory) can “reduced” to the analysis of dynamical Cantor sets: for instance, the theorems of Newhouse, Palis and Takens on homoclinic bifurcations of surfaces diffeomorphisms, and the theorems of Hall, Freiman and Moreira on the structure of the classical Lagrange and Markov spectra rely on the study of dynamical Cantor sets of the real line.

The wide range of applicability of dynamical Cantor sets is partly explained by the fact that several natural examples of Cantor sets are defined in terms of Dynamical Systems: for example, Cantor’s ternary set ${C}$ is

$\displaystyle C=\bigcap\limits_{n\in\mathbb{N}} T^{-n}([0,1])$

where ${T:[0,1/3]\cup [2/3,1]\rightarrow [0,1]}$ is ${T(x)=3x (\textrm{ mod } 1)}$.

In some applications of dynamical Cantor sets, it is important to dispose of estimates on their Hausdorff dimensions: for instance, the celebrated work of Bourgain and Kontorovich on Zaremba’s conjecture needs particular types of dynamical Cantor sets with Hausdorff dimension close to one.

For this reason, a considerable literature on this topic was developed. Among the diverse settings covered by many authors, one finds the articles of Bumby, Hensley, …, Jenkinson-Pollicott, Falk-Nussbaum, where the so-called thermodynamical methods are exploited to produce approximations for the Hausdorff dimension of Cantor sets defined in terms of continued fraction expansions (i.e., Cantor sets of number-theoretical nature).

In general, the thermodynamical methods quoted above provide a sequence ${s_n}$ of fast-converging approximations for the Hausdorff dimension ${HD(K)}$ of dynamical Cantor sets: for instance, the algorithm described by Jenkinson-Pollicott here gives a sequence ${s_n}$ converging to ${HD(E_2)}$ at super-exponential speed, i.e., ${|s_n-HD(E_2)|\leq C \theta^{n^2}}$ for some constants ${C>0}$ and ${0<\theta<1}$, where ${E_2}$ is the Cantor set of real numbers whose continued fraction expansions contain only ${1}$ and ${2}$.

In particular, the thermodynamical methods give good heuristics for the first several digits of the Hausdorff dimension of dynamical Cantor sets (e.g., if we list ${s_n}$ for ${1\leq n\leq 10}$ and the first three digits of ${s_n}$ coincide for all ${5\leq n\leq 10}$, then it is likely that one has found the first three digits of ${HD(K)}$).

The heuristic bounds provided by the thermodynamical methods can be turned into rigorous estimates: indeed, one of the goals of the recent work of Jenkinson-Pollicott consists into rigorously computing the first 100 digits of ${HD(E_2)}$.

However, the conversion of heuristic bounds into rigorous estimates is not always easy, and, for this reason, sometimes a slowly converging method producing two sequences ${\alpha_n}$ and ${\beta_n}$ of rigorous bounds (i.e., ${\alpha_n for all ${n\in\mathbb{N}}$) might be interesting for practical purposes.

In this post, we explain a method described in pages 68 to 70 of Palis-Takens book giving explicit sequences ${\alpha_n\leq HD(K)\leq \beta_n}$ converging slowly (e.g., ${\beta_n-\alpha_n\leq C/n}$ for some constant ${C>0}$ and all ${n\in\mathbb{N}}$) towards ${HD(K)}$, and, for the sake of comparison, we apply it to exhibit crude bounds on the Hausdorff dimensions of some Cantor sets defined in terms of continued fraction expansions.

Posted by: matheuscmss | December 9, 2016

## “Quelques contributions à la théorie de l’action de SL(2,R) sur les espaces de modules de surfaces plates”

I have just upload to the arXiv the memoir of my Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches’ (HDR) dossier.

This memoir is a preliminary step towards obtaining a HDR diploma (a general requirement in the French academic system to supervise PhD students, etc.) and it summarizes some of my researches after my PhD thesis (or, more specifically, my researches on the dynamics of the Teichmüller flow).

Despite the title and abstract in French, the main part of this memoir is in English.

The first chapter of the memoir recalls many basic facts on the $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ action on the moduli spaces of translation surfaces. In particular, this chapter is a general introduction to all subsequent chapters of the memoir. Here, the exposition is inspired from Zorich’s survey, Yoccoz’s survey and our survey with Forni.

After reading the first chapter, the reader is free to decide the order in which the remainder of the memoir will be read: indeed, the subsequent chapters are independent from each other.

The second chapter of the memoir is dedicated to the main result in my paper with Avila and Yoccoz on the Eskin-Kontsevich-Zorich regularity conjecture. Of course, the content of this chapter borrows a lot from my four blog posts on this subject.

The third chapter of the memoir discusses my paper with Schmithüsen on complementary series (and small spectral gap) for explicit families of arithmetic Teichmüller curves (i.e., $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$-orbits of square-tiled surfaces).

The fourth chapter of the memoir is dedicated to my paper with Wright on the applications of the notion of Hodge-Teichmüller planes to the question of classification of algebraically primitive Teichmüller curves. Evidently, some portions of this chapter are inspired by my blog posts on this topic.

The fifth chapter of the memoir is consacrated to Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over arithmetic Teichmüller curves. Indeed, after explaining the results in my paper with Eskin about the applications of Furstenberg boundaries to the simplicity of Lyapunov exponents, we spend a large portion of the chapter discussing the Galois-theoretical criterion for simplicity of Lyapunov exponents developed in my paper with Möller and Yoccoz. Finally, we conclude this chapter with an application of these results (obtained together with Delecroix in this paper here) to a counter-example to a conjecture of Forni.

The last chapter of the memoir is based on my paper with Filip and Forni on the construction of examples of exotic’ Kontsevich-Zorich monodromy groups and it is essentially a slightly modified version of this blog post here.

Closing this short post, let me notice that the current version of this memoir still has no acknowledgements (except for a dedicatory to Jean-Christophe Yoccoz’s memory) because I plan to add them only after I get the referee reports. Logically, once I get the feedback from the referees, I’m surely going to include acknowledgements to my friends/coauthors who made this memoir possible! 😀

Posted by: matheuscmss | November 28, 2016

## “Mesures stationnaires absolument continues”

About 3+1/2 weeks ago, Jean-François Quint gave a very nice talk (with same title as this post) during Paris 6 and 7 “Journées de dynamique” about his joint work with Yves Benoist on the regularity properties of stationary measures.

In what follows, I’m reproducing my notes for Jean-François Quint’s lecture. (As usual, all errors/mistakes in the sequel are my responsibility.)

1. Introduction

1.1. Limit sets of semigroups of matrices

Let ${\Gamma\subset GL_d(\mathbb{R})}$ be a semigroup of invertible ${d\times d}$ real matrices.

Recall that:

• ${\Gamma}$ is irreducible if there are no non-trivial ${\Gamma}$-invariant subspaces, i.e., ${V\subset\mathbb{R}^d}$ and ${\Gamma(V)=V}$ imply ${V=\{0\}}$ or ${\mathbb{R}^d}$;
• ${\Gamma}$ is proximal if it contains a proximal element ${g\in\Gamma}$, i.e., ${g}$ has an unique eigenvalue with maximal modulus which has multiplicity one in the characteristic polynomial of ${g}$; equivalently, ${\mathbb{R}^d = \mathbb{R} x_g^+ \oplus V_g^{<}}$, ${g(x_g^+)=\lambda x_g^+}$, ${g(V_g^{<})=V_g^{<}}$ and ${g|_{V_g^{<}}}$ has spectral radius ${<|\lambda|}$ or, in other terms, the action of ${g}$ on the projective space ${\mathbb{P}^{d-1}}$ has an attracting fixed point.

Proposition 1 Let ${\Gamma\subset GL_d(\mathbb{R})}$ be a irreducible and proximal semigroup. Then, the action of ${\Gamma}$ on ${\mathbb{P}^{d-1}}$ admits a smallest non-empty invariant closed subset ${\Lambda_{\Gamma}}$ called the limit set of ${\Gamma}$.

Proof: Let ${\Lambda_{\Gamma}:=\overline{\{\mathbb{R}x_g^+: g\in\Gamma \textrm{ proximal}\}}}$. It is clear that ${\Lambda_{\Gamma}}$ is non-empty, closed and invariant. Moreover, ${\Lambda_{\Gamma}}$ is the smallest subset with these properties thanks to the following argument. Let ${g\in\Gamma}$ be a proximal element. If ${x\notin\mathbb{P}(V_g^{<})}$, then ${g^n(x)}$ converges to ${\mathbb{R}x_g^+}$ as ${n\rightarrow\infty}$. If ${x\in\mathbb{P}(V_g^{<})}$, we use the irreducibility of ${\Gamma}$ to find an element ${\gamma\in\Gamma}$ such that ${\gamma(x)\notin\mathbb{P}(V_g^{<})}$ and, a fortiori, ${g^n(\gamma(x))}$ converges to ${\mathbb{R}x_g^+}$ as ${n\rightarrow\infty}$. $\Box$

1.2. Stationary measures

Suppose that ${\mu}$ is a probability measure on a semigroup ${G}$ acting on a space ${X}$. We say that a probability measure ${\nu}$ on ${X}$ is ${\mu}$stationary if it is ${G}$-invariant on average, i.e.,

$\displaystyle \mu\ast\nu:=\int_G g_{\ast}(\nu) d\mu(g)$

is equal to ${\nu}$.

In the case of irreducible and proximal semigroups of matrices, the following theorem of Furstenberg and Kesten ensures the existence and uniqueness of stationary measures for the corresponding projective actions:

Theorem 2 (Furstenberg-Kesten) Let ${\mu}$ be a Borel probability measure on ${GL_d(\mathbb{R})}$ and denote by ${\Gamma_{\mu}}$ the subsemigroup generated by the elements in the support ${\textrm{supp}(\mu)}$ of ${\mu}$. Suppose that ${\Gamma_{\mu}}$ is irreducible and proximal. Then, ${\mu}$ has an unique ${\mu}$-stationary measure on ${\mathbb{P}^{d-1}}$ and ${\nu(\Lambda_{\Gamma_{\mu}})=1}$.

In what follows, we shall also assume that ${\Gamma_{\mu}}$ is strongly irreducible, i.e., ${\nu(\mathbb{P}V)=0}$ for all non-trivial proper subspaces ${V\subset \mathbb{R}^d}$, and we will be interested in the nature of ${\nu}$ in Furstenberg-Kesten theorem.

It is possible to show that if ${\mu}$ is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue (Haar) measure (on ${GL_d(\mathbb{R})}$), then ${\nu}$ is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure (on ${\mathbb{P}^{d-1}}$).

For this reason, we shall focus in the sequel on the following question:

Can ${\nu}$ be absolutely continuous when ${\mu}$ is finitely supported?

It was shown by Kaimanovich and Le Prince that the answer to this question is not always positive:

Theorem 3 (Kaimanovich-Le Prince) There exists ${S\subset SL_2(\mathbb{R})}$ finite (actually, ${\# S=2}$) such that ${S}$ spans a Zariski dense subsemigroup of ${SL_2(\mathbb{R})}$, but ${S}$ is the support of a probability measure ${\mu}$ such that the associated stationary measure ${\nu}$ on ${\mathbb{P}^1}$ is singular with respect to the Lebesgue measure.

On the other hand, Bárány-Pollicott-Simon and Bourgain showed that the answer to this question is sometimes positive:

Theorem 4 (Bárány-Pollicott-Simon, Bourgain) There exists ${S\subset SL_2(\mathbb{R})}$ finite supporting a probability measure ${\mu}$ such that the corresponding stationary measure ${\nu}$ is absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue.

Remark 1 As it was pointed out by Quint, the examples produced by Bourgain are explicit, but it would be desirable to get simpler explicit examples of sets ${S\subset SL_2(\mathbb{R})}$ satisfying the previous theorem. In this direction, he asked the following question. Denote by ${R_{\theta} = \left(\begin{array}{cc} \cos\theta & -\sin\theta \\ \sin\theta & \cos\theta \end{array}\right)}$, ${0<\theta<\pi/2}$ and ${g_t = \left(\begin{array}{cc} e^t & 0 \\ 0 & e^{-t} \end{array}\right)}$, ${t\in\mathbb{R}}$, and consider the probability measures

$\displaystyle \mu_{t,\theta}=\frac{1}{2}\left(\delta_{g_t} + \delta_{R_{\theta} g_t R_{\theta}^{-1}}\right)$

Is it true that, for each fixed ${\theta}$, if ${t}$ is small enough (and typical?), then the stationary measure ${\nu_{t,\theta}}$ associated to ${\mu_{t,\theta}}$ is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure? (Note that if ${t}$ is very large, then we are in the regime described by Kaimanovich-Le Prince theorem 3.)

1.3. Statement of the main result

In a recent paper, Benoist and Quint extended Theorem 4 to higher dimensions:

Theorem 5 (Benoist-Quint) For any ${d\geq 3}$, there exists ${S\subset GL_d(\mathbb{R})}$ finite and a probability measure ${\mu}$ with ${\textrm{supp}(\mu)=S}$ and ${\Gamma_{\mu}=\Gamma_S}$ proximal and strongly irreducible such that the corresponding stationary measure ${\nu}$ on ${\mathbb{P}^{d-1}}$ is absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue.

The remainder of this post is dedicated to the proof of this result.

Posted by: matheuscmss | November 7, 2016

## Arithmeticity of the Kontsevich-Zorich monodromy of a certain origami of genus three

Gabriela Weitze-Schmithüsen is currently visiting me in Paris and I took the opportunity to revisit some of my favorite questions about square-tiled surfaces / origamis.

Last week, we spent a couple of days revisiting the content of my blog post on Sarnak’s question about thin KZ monodromies and we realized that the origami ${\mathcal{O}_1}$ of genus 3 discussed in this post turns out to exhibit arithmetic KZ monodromy! (In particular, this answers my Mathoverflow question here.)

In this very short post, we show the arithmeticity of the KZ monodromy of ${\mathcal{O}_1}$.

1. Description of the KZ monodromy of ${\mathcal{O}_1}$

The KZ monodromy ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}}$ of ${\mathcal{O}_1}$ is the subgroup of ${\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{Z})}$ generated by the matrices

$\displaystyle A=\left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 & 1 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 \end{array}\right) \quad \textrm{and} \quad B=\left(\begin{array}{cccc} -1 & 0 & 0 & -1 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & -1 & 0 \\ 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \end{array}\right)$

of order three: see Remark 9 in this post here.

For the sake of exposition, we are going to permute the second and fourth vectors of the canonical basis using the permutation matrix

$\displaystyle P=\left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \end{array}\right),$

so that the KZ monodromy ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}}$ is the subgroup ${P\cdot\langle A, B\rangle\cdot P}$.

Remark 1 This change of basis is purely cosmetical: it makes that the symplectic form preserved by these matrices in ${P\cdot\langle A, B\rangle\cdot P}$ is

$\displaystyle \Upsilon=\left(\begin{array}{cccc} 0 & 0 & 0 & -1 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \end{array}\right)$

Denote by ${U(\mathbb{Z})}$ the subgroup of unipotent upper triangular matrices in ${\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{Z})}$.

2. Arithmeticity of the KZ monodromy of ${\mathcal{O}_1}$

A result of Tits says that a Zariski-dense subgroup ${\Gamma\subset \mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{Z})}$ such that ${\Gamma\cap U(\mathbb{Z})}$ has finite-index in ${U(\mathbb{Z})}$ must be arithmetic (i.e., ${\Gamma}$ has finite-index in ${\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{Z})}$).

Since we already know that ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}}$ is Zariski-dense (cf. Proposition 3 in this post here), it suffices to check that ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}\cap U(\mathbb{Z})}$ has finite-index in ${U(\mathbb{Z})}$.

For this sake, we follow the strategy in Section 2 of this paper of Singh and Venkataramana, namely, we study matrices in ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}}$ fixing the first basis vector ${e_1}$ and, a fortiori, stabilizing the flag ${\mathbb{Q} e_1\subset e_1^{\perp}:=\{v\in\mathbb{Q}^4:\Upsilon(v,e_1)=0\}\subset \mathbb{Q}^4}$.

After asking Sage to compute a few elements of ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}}$ (conjugates under ${P}$ of words on ${A}$, ${B}$, ${A^2}$ and ${B^2}$ of size ${\leq 10}$) fixing the basis vector ${e_1}$, we found the following interesting matrices:

$\displaystyle x:=P\cdot (A^2B)^2 (AB^2)^2 \cdot P = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 3 & -3 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 3 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right),$

$\displaystyle y:=P\cdot A B A^2 B A (AB^2)^2\cdot P = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 3 & 0 & 3 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & -3 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right),$

and

$\displaystyle z:=P\cdot A^2 B A^2 (B^2 A)^2 B\cdot P = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 3 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & -3 & 3 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right).$

In order to check that ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}\cap U(\mathbb{Z})}$ has finite index in ${U(\mathbb{Z})}$, we observe that

$\displaystyle \alpha = [y,x] = yxy^{-1}x^{-1} = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 18 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right),$

$\displaystyle \beta = x^6[y,x] = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 18 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 18 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right)$

$\displaystyle \gamma = y^6[y,x]^{-1} = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 18 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & -18 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right)$

$\displaystyle \delta = z^6 \beta^{-1} = z^6 (x^6 [y,x])^{-1} = \left(\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & -18 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array}\right)$

are elements in ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}\cap U(\mathbb{Z})}$ generating the positive root groups of ${\textrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{R})}$. In particular, ${\Gamma_{\mathcal{O}_1}\cap U(\mathbb{Z})}$ has finite-index in ${U(\mathbb{Z})}$, so that the argument is complete.

Remark 2 It is worth noticing that all non-arithmetic Veech surfaces in genus two provide examples of thin KZ monodromy, but this is not the case for origamis (arithmetic Veech surfaces) of genus 2 in the stratum ${\mathcal{H}(2)}$ with tiled by ${\leq 6}$ squares (as well as for the origami ${\mathcal{O}_1}$ of genus three mentioned above). In particular, this indicates that Sarnak’s question about existence and/or abundance of thin KZ monodromies among origamis might have an interesting answer…

Posted by: matheuscmss | October 29, 2016

## Lyapunov exponents of regular origamis are not determined by commutators

Finite groups generated by two elements are a rich source of examples of origamis (square-tiled surfaces). Indeed, given a finite group ${G}$ generated by ${h}$ and ${v}$, we take a collection of unit squares ${Sq(g)\subset\mathbb{R}^2}$ indexed by the elements ${g\in G}$ and we glue by translations the rightmost vertical, resp. topmost horizontal, side of ${Sq(g)}$ with the leftmost vertical, resp. bottommost horizontal, side of ${Sq(gh)}$, resp. ${Sq(gv)}$, to obtain an origami ${M(G,h,v)}$ naturally associated to the data of ${(G, h, v)}$.

Such origamis were baptized regular origamis by David Zmiaikou in his PhD thesis and the study of the so-called Kontsevich-Zorich over regular (and quasi-regular) origamis was pursued in our joint article with Jean-Christophe Yoccoz.

In this short post, I would like discuss some informal questions posed by Jean-Christophe right after the completion of our joint paper with David Zmiaikou (in order to keep a trace of them in case someone [e.g., myself] wants to think about this matter in the future).

1. Regular origamis and commutators

The commutator ${c=[h,v]=hvh^{-1}v^{-1}}$ determines the nature of the conical singularities of the origami ${M(G,h,v)}$: in fact, ${M(G, h, v)}$ has exactly ${\#G/\textrm{order}(c)}$ such singularities and the total angle around each of them singularities is ${2\pi \cdot \textrm{order}(c)}$.

Also, Yoccoz, Zmiaikou and I showed that the “potential blocks” of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over the ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})}$-orbit of ${M(G,h,v)}$ are completely determined by the commutator ${c=[h,v]}$ (cf. Theorem 1.1 of our paper).

Given this scenario, Jean-Christophe asked whether the Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle of ${M(G,h,v)}$ were also completely determined from the knowledge of ${c=[h,v]}$.

2. Lyapunov exponents and commutators

By the time we finished our joint paper, David Zmiaikou pointed out to me that the commutator is not a complete invariant for many algebraic question about ${(G,h,v)}$: for example, Daniel Stork proved (among other things) that the pairs of permutations ${\sigma:=(136), \tau:=(12345)}$ and ${\sigma'=(13)(26), \tau'=(12645)}$ have the same commutator ${c=(13642)=[\sigma,\tau]=[\sigma',\tau']}$ but they generate distinct T-systems of the alternate group ${A_6}$ (cf. Section 2.6 of David Zmiaikou’s PhD thesis for more comments).

This remark led me to play with the origamis ${\mathcal{O}:=M(A_6,\sigma,\tau)}$ and ${\mathcal{O}':=M(A_6,\sigma',\tau')}$ in an attempt to answer Jean-Christophe’s question.

First, note that both of them have ${\#A_6/\textrm{order}(c) = 72}$ conical singularities and the total angle around each of them is ${2\pi\cdot \textrm{order}(c)=10\pi}$. In particular, both ${\mathcal{O}}$ and ${\mathcal{O}'}$ have genus ${145=(\frac{72\times 4}{2}+1)}$.

On the other hand, a short computation with the aid of Sage (or a long calculation by hand) reveals that the ${SL(2,\mathbb{Z})}$-orbit of ${\mathcal{O}}$ has cardinality ${15}$ and the ${SL(2,\mathbb{Z})}$-orbit of ${\mathcal{O}'}$ has cardinality ${10}$ (this is closely related to the comments in Section 5 of Stork’s paper).

Remark 1 Recall that it is easy to algorithmically compute ${SL(2,\mathbb{Z})}$-orbits of origamis described by two permutations ${h}$ and ${v}$ of a finite collection of squares because ${SL(2,\mathbb{Z})}$ is generated by ${A=\left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 1 \\ 0 & 1 \end{array}\right)}$ and ${B=\left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 0 \\ 1 & 1 \end{array}\right)}$, and these matrices act on pairs of permutations by ${A(h,v)=(h,vh^{-1})}$ and ${B(h,v)=(hv^{-1},v)}$ (and the permutations ${(h,v)}$ and ${(shs^{-1},svs^{-1})}$ generate the same origami).

Moreover, this calculation also reveals that

• the ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})}$-orbit of ${\mathcal{O}}$ decomposes into four ${A}$-orbits:
• two ${A}$-orbits have size ${3}$ and all origamis in these orbits decompose into ${120}$ horizontal cylinders of width ${3}$ and height ${1}$;
• one ${A}$-orbit has size ${4}$ and all origamis in this orbit decompose into ${90}$ horizontal cylinders of width ${4}$ and height ${1}$;
• one ${A}$-orbit has size ${5}$ and all origamis in this orbit decompose into ${72}$ horizontal cylinders of width ${5}$ and height ${1}$.
• the ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})}$-orbit of ${\mathcal{O}'}$ decomposes into three ${A}$-orbits:
• one ${A}$-orbit contains a single origami decomposing into ${180}$ horizontal cylinders of width ${2}$ and height ${1}$;
• one ${A}$-orbit has size ${4}$ and all origamis in this orbit decompose into ${90}$ horizontal cylinders of width ${4}$ and height ${1}$;
• one ${A}$-orbit has size ${5}$ and all origamis in this orbit decompose into ${72}$ horizontal cylinders of width ${5}$ and height ${1}$.

This information can be plugged into the Eskin-Kontsevich-Zorich formula to determine the sums ${L(\mathcal{O})}$ and ${L(\mathcal{O}')}$ of the non-negative Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over the ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})}$-orbits of ${\mathcal{O}}$ and ${\mathcal{O}'}$.

Indeed, if ${M}$ is an origami with ${\kappa}$ conical singularities whose total angles around them are ${2\pi (k_i+1)}$, ${i=1,\dots,\kappa}$, then Alex Eskin, Maxim Kontsevich and Anton Zorich showed that the sum ${L(M)}$ of all non-negative Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})\cdot M}$ is

$\displaystyle L(M) = \frac{1}{12}\sum\limits_{i=1}^{\kappa}\frac{k_i(k_i+2)}{k_i+1} + \frac{1}{\# SL(2,\mathbb{Z})\cdot M} \sum\limits_{M_i\in SL(2,\mathbb{Z}) M}\sum\limits_{M_i=\cup \textrm{cyl}_{ij}} \frac{h_{ij}}{w_{ij}}$

where ${M_i=\cup\textrm{cyl}_{ij}}$ is the decomposition of ${M_i}$ into horizontal cylinders and ${h_{ij}}$, resp. ${w_{ij}}$ is the height, resp. width, of the horizontal cylinder ${\textrm{cyl}_{ij}}$.

In our setting, this formula gives

$\displaystyle L(\mathcal{O}) = \frac{1}{12}\frac{72\cdot 4\cdot 6}{5} + \frac{1}{15}\left(2\cdot 3\cdot 120\cdot\frac{1}{3} + 1\cdot 4\cdot 90\cdot \frac{1}{4} + 1\cdot 5\cdot 72\cdot \frac{1}{5}\right)$

and

$\displaystyle L(\mathcal{O}') = \frac{1}{12}\frac{72\cdot 4\cdot 6}{5} + \frac{1}{10}\left(1\cdot 1\cdot 180\cdot\frac{1}{2} + 1\cdot 4\cdot 90\cdot \frac{1}{4} + 1\cdot 5\cdot 72\cdot \frac{1}{5}\right)$

that is,

$\displaystyle L(\mathcal{O}) = \frac{278}{5} \neq 54 = L(\mathcal{O}')$

In particular, this allowed me to answer Jean-Christophe’s informal question: the knowledge of the commutator ${c=[\sigma,\tau]=[\sigma',\tau']}$ is not sufficient to determine the Lyapunov exponents.

3. Lyapunov exponents and T-systems?

Logically, this discussion led Jean-Christophe to ask a new question: how does the Lyapunov exponents of ${M(G,h,v)}$ relate to algebraic invariants of ${(G,h,v)}$? For example, is the Lyapunov exponent invariant’ equivalent to T-systems invariant’ (or is the Lyapunov exponent invariant’ a completely new invariant? [and, if so, can it be used to derive new interesting algebraic consequences for ${(G,h,v)}$?])

Remark 2 André Kappes and Martin Möller used Lyapunov exponents in another (but not completely unrelated) setting as new invariants’ to solve an algebraic problem (namely, classify commensurability classes of non-arithmetic lattices constructed by Pierre Deligne and George Mostow).

(Jean-Christophe and) I plan(ned) to come back to this question at some point in the future, but for now I will close this post here since I have nothing to say about this matter.

Posted by: matheuscmss | October 6, 2016

## Jota-Cê …

Last September 3, Jean-Christophe Yoccoz passed away after a long battle against illness. He was an incredible man whose huge influence on this blog and, more generally, on my mathematical life, is certainly evident to some readers.

Nevertheless, as my close friends know, Jean-Christophe’s influence on me goes way beyond Mathematics, and, after spending the last month trying to cope with this terrible loss, I believe that today I’m now ready from the emotional point of view to talk a little bit about the extraordinary role model he provided to me.

Since there is no doubt that Jean-Christophe’s mathematical work will be always a recurring theme in this blog, for now I prefer to postpone all purely mathematical discussions/hommages. Instead, this post contains some souvenirs’ of my 9 years of friendship with Jean-Christophe as a way to pay a modest tribute for all fantastic and unforgettable moments (both inside and outside Mathematics) shared with him.

1. Prologue

I saw Jean-Christophe for the first time during the International Conference on Dynamical Systems held at IMPA in July 2000. Indeed, Jean-Christophe entered the auditorium Ricardo Mañé accompanied by his son (coincidently born in 1984 like me) and wife to deliver a talk about his joint work (of 217 pages) with Jacob Palis (published in 2009).

I remember that I got lost after the first 5 minutes of Jean-Christophe’s lecture, mainly because at that time my mathematical background (of a first year PhD student) was not appropriate.

Remark 1 Retrospectively, I find it funny that, even though I could not understand this talk at the time, I would join Jean-Christophe and Jacob in 2009 in the investigation of some open questions left open by their paper.Indeed, I started working with them on this subject by accident: I was present at Collège de France when the offprints of this paper of Jean-Christophe and Jacob arrived by regular mail, and we started right away to “celebrate” it by drinking a coffee while informally discussing the problems left open in this work; at some point, our informal conversation became serious because we noticed an argument allowing to improve the information on the stable sets of the so-called non-uniformly hyperbolic horseshoes.

After this initial success, Jean-Christophe laughed out while saying (as a joke) that we should ask the journal to stop printing the article so that we could add to it an appendix with our brand new result, and, in a more serious tone, he proposed to use this “low-hanging fruit” as the beginning of a separate article (still in prepartion …) on this topic.

2. My first conversation with Jean-Christophe

After finishing my PhD in 2004, I started looking for post-doctoral positions. In 2006, Jean-Christophe was visiting IMPA (and also attending ICMP 2006), and my friend Gugu (an IMO gold medalist who finished his PhD at the age of 20 years-old) strongly encouraged me to ask Jean-Christophe whether he could eventually supervise my post-doctoral sejour’ in France.

Despite Gugu’s advice, I was hesitating to approach Jean-Christophe. In fact, even though a transition from Brazil to France would be relatively smooth under Jean-Christophe’s supervision (partly because his wife was Brazilian and, thus, he spoke Portuguese fluently), I was not sure that I could handle the pressure of becoming the third Brazilian post-doctoral student of a brilliant French mathematician whose expectations about Brazilian post-doctoral students were very high: indeed, his previous experience with Brazilians was to supervise the post-doctoral sejours’ of Gugu himself and Artur Avila.

After many conversations with Gugu and my wife, I finally got sufficiently motivated to knock the door of Jean-Christophe’s temporary office at IMPA, introduce myself and ask him to be my post-doctoral supersivor: after all, at worst I would simply get a no’ as an answer.

So, I knocked the door of his office and he called me in (by saying Oui, entrez’). I told him that I was looking for a post-doctoral advisor, I asked if he could advise me, and, when I was about to give him more details about the kind of Mathematics I have done so far, he gave me a big smile and he said: “There is no need for formal presentations: Gugu talked to me about you and it would be an honor to me to be your post-doctoral advisor.”

Such a kind and humble response was certainly not what I was expecting. In particular, I was still under the shock’ when I told him that I was very happy to hear his answer. Then, I quickly left the office, and my wife (who was waiting for me) saw my puzzled face and asked me: “So, what he said? Do you think the conversation went well?”. Here, I simply replied: “I’m not sure, but I think the conversation went well: if I heard it correctly, he told that it would be an honor to him to be my advisor.”

Of course, these two traits (kindness and humbleness) of Jean-Christophe’s personality are well-known among those who met him: in particular, Gugu was not surprised by his answer to me (and this is probably why Gugu insisted that I should talk to Jean-Christophe in the first place!).

3. My post-doctoral sejour’ in France

Several bureaucratic details made that I started my post-doctoral sejour’ in France in September 17, 2007, i.e., almost one year after my first conversation with Jean-Christophe.

Since the first day of my post-doctoral sejour’, Jean-Christophe was always very kind to me. For example, he offered me an office next to his own office, so that we could drink coffee, have lunch together and talk (in Portuguese) about many topics (including Mathematics) regularly.

Also, he would never hesitate to stop his research activities to help me with daily problems (e.g., openning a bank account to get my first salary): indeed, his constant support made that my first two years in France were quite smooth and, of course, this gave me the time needed to learn French.

Remark 2 Here, he gave the following precious advice: I would learn French more easily by seeing the news on TV because it is easier to absorb the information when just one person is talking calmly at a reasonably constant pace (indeed, this is what he did to learn Portuguese). Moreover, he put me in close contact with the secretaries, so that I would be forced to practice my French (because it was not possible to shift to Portuguese with them).

On the other hand, despite all his attention towards me, he left me completely free during the first year of my post-doctoral sejour’. In fact, as he told me later, he thought that the post-doctoral sejour’ was an important moment to develop our own ideas about Mathematics and, hence, it was not a good idea to impose to me any specific problem / research topic. In particular, he would limit himself to ask what I was doing recently and periodically invite me to give a talk in the Eliasson-Yoccoz seminar (so that the community would know what I was working on).

Consequently, we would start working in our first joint paper only in 2008…

4. Our first collaboration

Upon my return to Paris from a conference in Trieste (in August 2008), I talked to Jean-Christophe about the recently discovered example by Giovanni Forni and myself — later baptized Ornithorynque by Vincent Delecroix and Barak Weiss — of a translation surface with peculiar properties.

He got interested by the subject, and I started to explain to him the main features of the example: “the symmetries of this example are very particular because the Hodge structure on its cohomology …” After letting me end the description of the example, Jean-Christophe replied that, even though my explanation was mathematically correct, he was not happy because it does not allow to put your hands in the example’. In fact, his phrase (who made a profound impact on me) was: “I don’t like to work on extremely abstract theories with highly sophisticated arguments. I prefer to understand things from a concrete point of view, by working with many concrete examples before reaching the final result. In particular, my tactics’ is to cover the ground slowly via basic examples before exploring general theories.”

So, he thought that it could be a good idea to work together on a paper giving a explanation for the example in such a way that it could reveal more examples (ideally infinite families) with similar properties.

Frankly speaking, I also found that the original (Hodge-theoretical) arguments obtained with Giovanni had the drawback that they did not allow one to touch’ the example, and, for this reason, I accepted Jean-Christophe’s offer to investigate more closely the Ornithorynque.

The first meetings related to our work in the Ornithorynque were quite curious: while he would never refuse to meet anytime in the morning (9h, 8h, 7h30, …), we usually would stop our discussions by 3:30 PM or 4 PM because, as he liked to say, by this time “he had runned out of energy”.

At some point, I asked him what time he used to arrive at his office (so that I could try to maximize the span of our conversations). He simply smiled and said: “Normally I wake up around 4:30 or 5 AM, I take the first train and I arrive here around 6 AM.” (Of course, this explains why he could meet me in the morning at any time.) In fact, thanks to his metabolism, Jean-Christophe just needed to sleep about 6 hours per night.

After struggling a bit with my own metabolism, I managed to adapt myself to Jean-Christophe’s rythm and this lead us to a small competition’ to know how would arrive first at the office. Normally, I would arrive by 6:15 AM at Collège de France and, evidently, Jean-Christophe would be waiting for me with a bottle of fresh coffee (that he had prepared a few minutes ago at the kitchen of Collège), so that we would drink coffee together and talk about the latest news (on a variety of subjects: politics, chess, soccer, etc.) before starting our mathematical conversations. (In general, we would talk from 7 AM to 11:30 AM, take a break to have lunch together, and then come back to work until 3:30 PM or 4 PM.) However, it happened a couple of times that I managed somehow to arrive first in Collège: in every such occasion, Jean-Christophe would spend a couple of minutes explaining why he was late’. Indeed, this was the natural attitude to him because Jean-Christophe was someone who liked to do his best in everything regardless it was a small thing’ (e.g., arriving before me at Collège) or a big thing’ (e.g., proving theorems).

Our work on the Ornithorynque project’ was going well: the concrete approach of Jean-Christophe (computing tons of particular cases [including multiplying many 4×4 matrices by hand] at an extremely fast pace [which always forced me to be extremely concentrated to be able to follow him up…] for several hours in a row, always keeping an eye for symmetries’ to reduce the sizes of calculations, etc.) introduced me to a whole new way of doing Mathematics. In particular, there is no doubt that my own vision of Mathematics completely changed by seeing so closely how the mind of a brilliant mathematician works. Moreover, despite the enormous differences in our mathematical skills, Jean-Christophe was always open to hear my ideas and suggestions (and I will always be grateful to him for such an humble attitude towards me).

The rapid and steady progress in dissecting the Ornithorynque’ made that I did not want to completely stop working on it during the summer vacations in August 2009. So, I had no doubts that I should accept Jean-Christophe’s invitation to spend 10 days in his vacations house in Loctudy (in French Brittany). Since the vacations are sacred in France (it is usually very hard to contact French friends in August …), Jean-Christophe said that the amount of mathematical work in these 10 days would be decided by chance’, or, more accurately, by the weather. More precisely, we did the following agreement: we would start our day around 5h30 and work until 8h30; if the weather was nice (i.e., not raining too much) outside, we would stop talking about Mathematics and we would go for a walking in the forest or a boat trip in nearby islands, etc.; otherwise, we stay at home working on the Ornithorynque.

In principle, this agreement meant that we would work about ${50\%}$ of the time because the weather in French Brittany is very unstable: one might see several seasons’ within a given day …. However, as Jean-Christophe pointed out later, I was extremely lucky that it rained only in three days, so that we had plenty of leisure: we played pétanque, visited Île-de-Sein, etc.

The photos below illustrate such moments (during my second visit [in 2011] to Loctudy): the first picture displays Jean-Christophe plotting a strategy to improve the performance of our participation in a pétanque tournement in Loctudy (but my bad skills in this game made that we were kicked out of the tournement after three matches) and the next two photos show him in Île-de-Sein.

Remark 3 In Loctudy’s pétanque club, almost everyone knew that the well-known joke that you can give mathematicians a hard time by asking them to split a bill in a restaurant’ did not apply to Jean-Christophe. In fact, the standard procedure’ in the end of the tournement was to go to the bar, ask for a drink and wait for Jean-Christophe to compute (within 2 or 3 minutes) the rankings for the 42 or so participants, sizes of prizes, etc. Also, I overheard a conversation between a newcomer asking an organizer of the tournement: the newcomer was puzzled why everybody went take a drink instead to doing laborious calculations for setting rankings of participants, and the organizer smiled and said: “There is no need to worry. That guy over there will take care of all calculations in 2 minutes, and he knows what he is doing: indeed, he is a sort of Nobel prize’ in Mathematics…”

5. Some anecdotes of Jean-Christophe

Closing this post, I would like to share some anecdotes about Jean-Christophe: in fact, instead of describing more details of our subsequent collaborations, I believe that the reader might get a better idea of Jean-Christophe’s personality via a few anecdotes about other aspects of his life.

Jean-Christophe participated twice in Samba school parades in Rio de Janeiro, and he always laughed at the fact he had all kinds of experiences in these parades: in his first participation, his Samba school won the parade, but in his second participation, his Samba school got the last place…

Jean-Christophe liked to laugh at the fact that if Internet existed before, then the failed attempts of many countries to name the bird Turkey’ after its country of origin could have been avoided: indeed, the bird is called Turkey‘ in English, ‘Dinde‘ (a variant of D’Inde’, i.e., from India’) in French, Peru‘ in Portuguese, but the bird is originally Mexican.

Jean-Christophe was a strong chess player: his ELO rating was 2200+ at some point and we followed together many chess tournements via Chessbomb Arena (with particular attention to TCEC, a tournement for chess engines) during some breaks in our mathematical conversations, and he has many interesting anecdotes involving chess.

For example, he wrote here that his PhD advisor (Michel Herman) was so afraid that Jean-Christophe was spending too much time with Chess instead of Mathematics that he called Jean-Christophe’s parents for a conversation about his worries.

Also, once I invited Jean-Christophe, Gugu and Artur Avila for a barbecue at the vacations house of my wife’s family in Vargem Grande, Rio de Janeiro. At some point, we decided to play chess and, as usual, Gugu wanted to play against Jean-Christophe. For some reason, we thought that it could be a good idea to ask Jean-Christophe to play blindfold (with Artur and I moving the pieces in his place), while Gugu would play normally. After 25 moves or so, Gugu announces his move. Jean-Christophe takes a deep breath, spend a couple of minutes thinking, and then asks: Gugu, are you sure about your move?’. Gugu says yes’ and Jean-Christophe announces a checkmate in a couple of moves. Gugu is puzzled by Jean-Christophe’s claim, so he looks at the board and he comes up with the genius phrase in response to his blindfold friend: Is it already checkmate? I could not see it!’ Of course, Jean-Christophe was right and, after laughing for a couple of minutes at Gugu’s phrase, we passed to the next match (Jean-Christophe versus me…).

Jean-Christophe liked sports in general: during his youth, he played rugby and he sailed together with his friends from École Normale Supérieure, and he followed on TV and newspapers many tournements (soccer, rugby, golf, snooker, …). In particular, we saw together several finals of the UEFA Champions League while drinking his favorite beer (namely, Guinness) and he followed on the hospital’s TV the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (which was especially interesting to him because he knew Rio’s Zona Sul’ [where rowing and cycling took place]).

Finally, Jean-Christophe was an avid reader and an erudite person: he read (in French, English and Portuguese) many books and novels per month, he saw many movies, and he liked to go to museums. For example:

• he was happy when he learned that I read The Murders in the Rue Morgue (partly because Edgar Allan Poe was one of his favorite writers),
• he borrowed me Crimes Cèlebres by Alexandre Dumas and Ne le dis à personne (French version of a thriller novel) by Harlan Corben, so that I could improve my French,
• besides the classical in Brazilian literature (by Machado de Assis, José de Alencar, etc.), Jean-Christophe liked Agosto’ by Rubem Fonseca. In fact, Jean-Christophe told me that he read the original book in Portuguese because he was not sure that the French translation was very good: indeed, the title of Agosto’ — literally August’ in English — was translated as Un été brésilien‘ — a Brazilian summer’ — reveals that the editors probably did a job of questionable quality since it is winter (and not summer) in Brazil in August …
• he was a big fan of Alfred Hitchock (among many other film directors): in particular, I will always remember with affection a Hitchcock session’ in Jean-Christophe’s vacations house in Loctudy.
• after trying to read (unsuccessfully) À la recherche du temps perdu‘ during his youth, Jean-Christophe spent the last months of his life (doing Mathematics and) re-reading all seven volumes of Proust’s novel …

6. Epilogue

Since a picture is worth more than a thousand words, I’m sharing below a couple of photos of Jean-Christophe (holding my daughter, next to my wife [during vacations in French Brittany], working with me at Mittag-Leffler institute on our joint paper with Martin Moeller, and together with Gugu, Artur, Fernando Codá Marques, Susan Schommer and myself in Artur’s appartment, respectively).

Posted by: matheuscmss | August 3, 2016

## Yoccoz proof of Jakobson theorem II

Last time, we introduced the notion of regular parameter ${c\in[-2,0)}$ of the quadratic family ${P_c(x) = x^2+c}$ and we saw that the orbits of ${P_c}$ have a nice statistical description when ${c}$ is regular. In particular, this reduced our initial goal (of proving Jakobson’s theorem) to show that regular parameters are abundant near ${-2}$, i.e.,

$\displaystyle \lim\limits_{\varepsilon\rightarrow 0} \frac{\textrm{Leb}(\{c\in[-2,-2+\varepsilon]; c \textrm{ is regular}\})}{\varepsilon} = 1 \ \ \ \ \ (1)$

As it turns out, Yoccoz’s proof of (1) is indirect: first, he introduces the notion of strongly regular parameter and he proves that strongly regular parameters are a special case of regular parameters; secondly, he exploits the nice features of strong regularity to transfer some key properties from the phase space ${x\in\mathbb{R}}$ to the parameter space ${c\in[-2,0)}$ in order to prove that

$\displaystyle \lim\limits_{\varepsilon\rightarrow 0} \frac{\textrm{Leb}(\{c\in[-2,-2+\varepsilon]; c \textrm{ is strongly regular}\})}{\varepsilon} = 1 \ \ \ \ \ (2)$

Today, we shall define strong regularity and prove the regularity of such parameters (while leaving the proof of (2) for the final post of this series).

1. Some preliminaries

1.1. Quick review of the regularity property

For ${c\in [-2,0)}$, ${P_c(x):=x^2+c}$ has two fixed points ${\alpha=\alpha(c)}$ and ${\beta=\beta(c)}$ with ${-\beta<\alpha<0}$. Note that the critical value ${c=P_c(0)}$ belongs to ${[-\beta,\alpha)}$.

In a certain sense, the key idea is to study the dynamics of ${P_c}$ via certain intervals (“Yoccoz puzzle pieces”) bounded by points in the pre-orbits of ${\pm\alpha}$.

For example, the notion of regular parameter was defined with the aid of the intervals ${A:=[\alpha,-\alpha]}$ and ${\widehat{A}:=[\alpha^{(1)},-\alpha^{(1)}]}$ where ${\alpha^{(1)}=\alpha^{(1)}(c)\in (-\beta,\alpha)}$ is given by ${P_c(\alpha^{(1)}) = -\alpha}$. Indeed, ${c\in [-2,0)}$ is regular if there are ${C>0}$ and ${\theta>0}$ such that

$\displaystyle \textrm{Leb}(\{x\in A: x \textrm{ is not } n\textrm{-regular}\})\leq C e^{-\theta n}$

for all ${n\in\mathbb{N}}$. Here, ${x}$ is called ${n}$regular if there are ${0 and an interval ${\widehat{J}\ni x}$ such that ${P_c^m}$ sends ${\widehat{J}}$ diffeomorphically onto ${\widehat{A}}$ in such a way that ${P_c^m(x)\in A}$. For later use, we denote by ${g_J}$ the inverse branch of ${P_c^m}$ restricted to ${\widehat{J}}$.

In general, any ${n}$-regular point belongs to a regular interval of order ${m\leq n}$, that is, an interval ${J\subset [-\beta,\beta]}$ possessing an open neighborhood ${\widehat{J}\supset J}$ such that ${P_c^m}$ sends ${\widehat{J}}$ diffeomorphically onto ${\widehat{A}}$ in such a way that ${P_c^m(J)=A}$. In other words, the set of ${n}$-regular points is the union of regular intervals of orders ${\leq n}$.

It is easy to describe regular intervals (“Yoccoz puzzle pieces”) in terms of the pre-orbits of ${\pm\alpha}$. In fact, denote by ${\Delta_n=\Delta_n(c):=P_c^{-n-1}(\{\alpha\})}$ (so that ${\Delta_0=\{\alpha,-\alpha\}}$ and ${\Delta_1=\{\pm\alpha,\pm\alpha^{(1)}\}}$). It is not difficult to check that if ${J=[\gamma^-,\gamma^+]}$ is a regular interval of order ${m}$ and ${\widehat{J}=(\widehat{\gamma}^-,\widehat{\gamma}^+)}$ is the associated neighborhood, then ${\gamma^-<\gamma^+}$ are consecutive points of ${\Delta_m}$ and ${\widehat{\gamma}^-<\gamma^-<\gamma^+}$ are consecutive points of ${\Delta_{m+1}}$.

1.2. Dynamically meaningful partition of the parameter space

For later use, we organize the parameter space ${[-2,0)}$ as follows. For each ${M\in\mathbb{N}}$, we consider a maximal open interval ${(c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$ such that ${P_c^M(0)}$ is the first return of ${0}$ to ${A}$ under ${P_c}$ for all ${c\in(c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$.

In analytical terms, we can describe the sequence ${c^{(m)}}$ as follows. For ${c\in [-2,0)}$, let ${\alpha^{(0)} = \alpha^{(0)}(c)}$ be ${\alpha^{(0)}:=\alpha}$ and, for ${m>0}$, define recursively ${\alpha^{(m)}=\alpha^{(m)}(c)}$ as

$\displaystyle P_c(\alpha^{(m)})=-\alpha^{(m-1)}, \quad \alpha^{(m)} < 0$

In these terms, ${c^{(m)}}$ is the solution of the equation ${c=P_c(0)=\alpha^{(m-1)}(c)}$.

Remark 1 From this analytical definition of ${c^{(m)}}$, one can show inductively that ${P_c^M(0)\in A}$ for ${c\in (c^{(M)},c^{(M-1)})}$ along the following lines.By definition, ${\frac{\partial\alpha^{(m)}}{\partial c} = -\frac{1}{2\alpha^{(m)}} (1+\frac{\partial\alpha^{(m-1)}}{\partial c})}$. This inductive relation can be exploited to give that ${1/3\leq \frac{\partial\alpha^{(m)}(c)}{\partial c}\leq 1/2}$ for all ${m\in\mathbb{N}}$ and ${c\in [-2,-3/2]}$.

This estimate allows us to show that the function ${c\mapsto P_c(0) - \alpha^{(m-1)}(c)}$ has derivative between ${1/2}$ and ${2/3}$ for ${c\in[-2,-3/2]}$. Since this function takes a negative value ${-2-\alpha^{(m-1)}(-2)<0}$ at ${c=-2}$ and a positive value ${\alpha^{(m-2)}(c^{(m-1)})-\alpha^{(m-1)}(c^{(m-1)})>0}$ at ${c=c^{(m-1)}}$, we see that this function has a unique simple zero ${c^{(m)}\in (-2, c^{(m-1)})}$ such that ${P_c(0)\in [-2,\alpha^{(m-1)}(c)]}$ for ${c\in [-2,c^{(m)}]}$, as desired.

Remark 2 Note that ${c^{(m)}}$ is a decreasing sequence such that ${\frac{1}{C 4^m}\leq c^{(m)}+2\leq \frac{C}{4^m}}$ for some universal constant ${C>0}$. Indeed, the function ${c\mapsto P_c(0)-\alpha^{(m-1)}(c)}$ takes the value ${-2-\alpha^{(m-1)}(-2)=-4\sin^2\frac{\pi}{3 2^m}}$ at ${c=-2}$ (cf. Subsection 4.2 of the previous post), it vanishes at ${c=c^{(m)}}$, and it has derivative between ${1/2}$ and ${2/3}$, so that ${1/1000\leq 4^m(c^{(m)}+2)\leq 1000}$.

From now on, we think of ${c\in (c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$ where ${M}$ is a large integer.

2. Strong regularity

Given ${c\in (c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$, let ${\mathcal{J}}$ be the collection of maximal regular intervals of positive order contained in ${A}$ and consider

$\displaystyle W := \bigcup\limits_{J\in\mathcal{J}} \textrm{int}(J),$

${N:W\rightarrow\mathbb{N}}$ the function ${N(x)=\textrm{order}(J)}$ for ${x\in J}$, and ${T:W\rightarrow A}$ the map ${T(x)=P_c^{N(x)}(x)}$ (${=P_c^{\textrm{order of } J}(x)}$ for ${x\in J}$): cf. Subsection 4.3.3 of this post here.

Remark 3 Even though ${0}$ is not contained in any element of ${\mathcal{J}}$, we set ${N(0)=M}$ and ${T(0)=P_c^M(0)}$ for ${c\in (c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$.

The elements of ${\mathcal{J}}$ of “small” orders are not hard to determine. Given ${1\leq n < M}$, define ${\widetilde{\alpha}^{(n)}\in\Delta_n}$ by:

$\displaystyle P_c(\widetilde{\alpha}^{(n)}) = \alpha^{(n-1)}, \quad \widetilde{\alpha}^{(n)} < 0$

It is not difficult to check that the sole elements of ${\mathcal{J}}$ of order ${1 are the intervals

$\displaystyle C_n^+ := [\widetilde{\alpha}^{(n-1)}, \widetilde{\alpha}^{(n)}] \quad \textrm{and} \quad C_n^- = [-\widetilde{\alpha}^{(n)}, -\widetilde{\alpha}^{(n-1)}]$

and, furthermore, any other element of ${\mathcal{J}}$ has order ${>M}$.

The intervals ${C_n^{\pm}}$, ${1, are called simple regular intervals: this terminology reflects the fact that they are the most “basic” type of regular intervals.

In this setting, a parameter ${c}$ is strongly regular if “most” of the returns of ${\{P_c^j(0)\}_{j\in\mathbb{N}}}$ to ${W}$ occur on simple regular intervals:

Definition 1 We say that ${c\in (c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$ is strongly regular up to level ${K}$ if ${P_c^M(0):=T(0)\in \bigcap\limits_{k=0}^{K-1} T^{-k}(W)}$ and, for each ${1\leq k\leq K}$, one has

$\displaystyle \sum\limits_{\substack{0<\ell\leq k \\ N(T^{\ell}(0))>M}} N(T^{\ell}(0)) \leq 2^{-\sqrt{M}} \sum\limits_{\ell=1}^k N(T^{\ell}(0)) \ \ \ \ \ (3)$

A parameter ${c}$ is called strongly regular if it is strongly regular of all levels ${K\in\mathbb{N}}$.

Remark 4 Let ${c\in (c^{(M)}, c^{(M-1)})}$ be a strongly regular parameter. It takes a while before ${\{P_c^j(0)\}_{j\in\mathbb{N}}}$ encounters a non-simple regular interval: if ${N(T^k(0))>M}$ (or, equivalently, ${T^k(0)\in (-\widetilde{\alpha}^{(M-2)}, \widetilde{\alpha}^{(M-2)})}$), then (3) implies that

$\displaystyle N(T^k(0))\leq \frac{2^{-\sqrt{M}}}{1-2^{-\sqrt{M}}}(N_k-M)$

where ${N_{k+1}:=\sum\limits_{\ell=0}^{k} N(T^{\ell}(0)) = M + \sum\limits_{\ell=1}^k N(T^{\ell}(0))}$. In particular, ${N_{k+1}\geq 2^{\sqrt{M}} M}$, so that the first ${2^{\sqrt{M}} M}$ iterates of ${0}$ encounter ${A}$ exclusively at simple regular intervals.

3. Regularity of strongly regular parameters

Let us now outline the proof of the fact that strongly regular parameters are regular.

Posted by: matheuscmss | June 21, 2016

## Symbolic dynamics for non-uniformly hyperbolic surface maps with discontinuities

Yuri Lima and I have just uploaded to ArXiv our paper “Symbolic dynamics for non-uniformly hyperbolic maps with discontinuities”. The main motivation for our paper is the question of extending the celebrated (Brin prize) work of Sarig on symbolic models/Markov partitions for smooth surface diffeomorphisms to the context of billiard maps: indeed, the main result of our paper is a partial solution to a problem appearing in page 346 of Sarig’s article.

An interesting corollary of our results is a refinement of a theorem of Chernov on the number of periodic points of certain billiard maps. More precisely, for a certain class of billiard maps ${f:M\rightarrow M}$, Chernov proved that

$\displaystyle \liminf\limits_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{1}{n}\log\#\textrm{Per}_n(f)\geq h$

where ${\textrm{Per}_n(f)}$ is the set of periodic points of ${f}$ with period ${n}$ and ${h}$ is the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy of the Liouville measure. From our main results, Yuri and I can show that the billiard maps ${f:M\rightarrow M}$ studied by Chernov actually satisfy:

$\displaystyle \exists\, C>0, \, p\in\mathbb{N} \textrm{ such that } \#\textrm{Per}_{np}(f)\geq C e^{hnp} \, \forall \, n\in\mathbb{N}$

Remark 1 Our improvement of Chernov’s theorem is “similar in spirit” to Sarig’s improvement of Katok’s theorem on the number of periodic points for smooth surface diffeomorphisms: see Theorem 1.1 in Sarig’s paper for more details.

Below the fold, we give a slightly simplified version of the main result in our paper and we explain some steps of its proof.

Posted by: matheuscmss | June 6, 2016

## Zorich conjecture for hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups

Artur Avila, Jean-Christophe Yoccoz and I have just uploaded to ArXiv our paper Zorich conjecture for hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups.

This is the first installment of a series of two articles on the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over certain ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})}$-invariant loci in moduli spaces of translation surfaces obtained from cyclic cover constructions (inspired from the works of Veech and McMullen).

More precisely, the second paper of this series (still in preparation) studies the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over ${SL(2,\mathbb{R})}$-orbits of certain cyclic covers of translation surfaces in hyperelliptic components called ${\mathcal{H}(2g-2)^{hyp}}$ and ${\mathcal{H}(g-1,g-1)^{hyp}}$ in the literature. (The curious reader can find more explanations about this forthcoming paper in this old blog post here [cf. Remark 7].)

Of course, before studying the cyclic covers, we need to obtain some good description of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle on the hyperelliptic components and this is the purpose of the first article of the series.

Since the first paper of this series is not long, this post will just give a brief “reader’s guide” rather than entering into the technical details.

Remark 1 In the sequel, we will assume some familiarity with translation surfaces.

1. Rauzy-Veech groups and Zorich conjecture

The starting point of our article is a description of certain combinatorial objects — called hyperelliptic Rauzy diagrams — coding the dynamics of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle on ${\mathcal{H}(2g-2)^{hyp}}$ and ${\mathcal{H}(g-1,g-1)^{hyp}}$.

Remark 2 By the time that the first version of our article was written, we thought that we found a new description of these diagrams, but Pascal Hubert kindly pointed out to us that G. Rauzy was aware of it.

One important feature of this description of hyperelliptic Rauzy diagrams is the fact that we can order these diagrams by “complexity” in such a way that two consecutive diagrams can be related to each other by an inductive procedure.

The behavior of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle (with respect to Masur-Veech measures) is described in general by the Rauzy-Veech algorithm: roughly speaking, this algorithm is a natural way to attach matrices (acting on homology groups) to the arrows of Rauzy diagrams, and, in this language, the action of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle is just the multiplication of the matrices attached to concatenations of arrows of Rauzy diagrams.

In particular, the features of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle (with respect to Masur-Veech measures) can be derived from the study of the so-called Rauzy-Veech groups, i.e., the groups generated by the matrices attached to the arrows of a given Rauzy diagram. For example, the celebrated paper of Avila and Viana solving affirmatively a conjecture of Kontsevich and Zorich proves the simplicity of the Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle by establishing (inductively) the pinching and twisting properties for Rauzy-Veech groups.

In our article, we exploit the “inductive” description of hyperelliptic Rauzy diagrams to compute the hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups.

Remark 3 Our arguments for the computation of hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups were inspired from the calculations of ${U(p,q)}$-blocks of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle over cyclic covers in the second paper of this series. In other words, we first developed some parts of the second paper before writing the first paper.

An interesting corollary of this computation is the fact that hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups are explicit finite-index subgroups of the symplectic groups ${\textrm{Sp}(2g,\mathbb{Z})}$, so that they are Zariski dense in ${\textrm{Sp}(2g,\mathbb{R})}$.

The Zariski density of (general) Rauzy-Veech groups in symplectic groups was conjectured by Zorich (see, e.g., Remark 6.12 in Avila-Viana paper) as a step towards the Kontsevich-Zorich conjecture established by Avila-Viana. Therefore, the previous paragraph means that Zorich conjecture is true for hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups (and this justifies our choice for the title of our paper).

Here, it is worth to point out that Zorich conjecture asks more than what is needed to prove the Kontsevich-Zorich conjecture. Indeed, the Zariski denseness in symplectic groups imply the pinching and twisting properties of Avila-Viana, so that Zorich conjecture implies Kontsevich-Zorich conjecture. On the other hand, we saw in this previous blog post that a pinching and twisting group of symplectic matrices might not be Zariski dense: in other words, the techniques of Avila-Viana solve the Kontsevich-Zorich without addressing Zorich conjecture.

Thus, our proof of Zorich conjecture for hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups gives an alternative proof of this particular case of Avila-Viana theorem.

2. Braid groups and A’Campo theorem

After a preliminary version of our article was complete, Martin Möller noticed some similarities between our characterization of hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups and a result of A’Campo on the images of certain monodromy representations associated to hyperelliptic Riemann surfaces.

As it turns out, this is not a coincidence: we showed that the elements of the hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech group associated to certain elementary loops on hyperelliptic Rauzy diagrams are induced by Dehn twists lifting the generators of a braid group; hence, this permits to recover our description of hyperelliptic Rauzy-Veech groups from A’Campo theorem.

Remark 4 In a certain sense, the previous paragraph is a sort of sanity test: the same groups found by A’Campo were rediscovered by us using different methods.

Closing this short post, let me point out that this relationship between loops in hyperelliptic Rauzy diagrams and Dehn twists in hyperelliptic surfaces reveals an interesting fact: the fundamental groups of the combinatorial model (hyperelliptic Rauzy diagram) coincides with the orbifold fundamental groups of ${\mathcal{H}(2g-2)^{hyp}}$ and ${\mathcal{H}(g-1,g-1)^{hyp}}$. In other words, the hyperelliptic Rauzy diagrams “see” the topology of objects (${\mathcal{H}(2g-2)^{hyp}}$ and ${\mathcal{H}(g-1,g-1)^{hyp}}$) coded by them.

Posted by: matheuscmss | May 29, 2016

## Yoccoz proof of Jakobson theorem I

Almost twenty years ago, Jean-Christophe Yoccoz gave several lectures (at ETH and Collège de France, for instance) on a proof of Jakobson theorem (based on the so-called Yoccoz puzzles), and he distributed hard copies of his lecture notes whenever they were requested (for example, he gave me such a copy when I became his post-doctoral student in 2007).

More recently, he gave a couple of lectures at Collège de France aiming to generalize his proof of Jakobson theorem to obtain some results improving upon the Wang-Young theory of rank one attractors.

Of course, his lectures (whose videos are available at his website) started by recalling several elements of his proof of Jakobson theorem and I decided to take the opportunity to write a series of posts about Jean-Christophe’s proof of Jakobson theorem (based on his hand-written lecture notes from 1997).

For the first installment of this series, we’ll review some aspects of the dynamics of the one-dimensional quadratic maps and, after that, we’ll state Jakobson’s theorem, describe the three main steps of Yoccoz proof of Jakobson theorem and implement the first step of the strategy.

1. Introduction

The dynamics of one-dimensional affine maps ${F_{a,b}(z)=az+b}$ is fairly easy understand. The change of variables provided by the translation ${T_c(z)=z+c}$ transforms ${F_{a,b}}$ into ${(T_c^{-1}\circ F_{a,b}\circ T_c)(z) = az + ((a-1)c+b)}$. If ${a\neq 1}$, the choice ${c=-b/(a-1)}$ shows that the affine map ${F_{a,b}}$ is conjugated to its linear part ${F_{a,0}(z)=az}$. If ${a=1}$, ${F_{a,b}(z)=z+b}$ is a translation.

In other words, the dynamics of polynomial maps ${P:\mathbb{C}\rightarrow\mathbb{C}}$ is not very interesting when ${\textrm{deg}(P)=1}$. On the other hand, we shall see below that quadratic maps are already sufficiently complicated to produce all kinds of rich dynamical behaviors.

The quadratic family is ${P_c(z)=z^2+c}$ where ${z\in\mathbb{C}}$ and ${c\in\mathbb{C}}$.

Remark 1 This family is sometimes presented in the literature as ${c-z^2}$ or ${cz(1-z)}$. As it turns out, these presentations are equivalent to each other: indeed, the affine change of variables ${h(z)=Az+B}$ converts ${P_c}$ into

$\displaystyle (h^{-1}\circ P_c\circ h)(z) = Az^2+2Bz+\frac{B^2+c-B}{A}$

The dynamics of ${P_c}$ near infinity is easy to understand: in fact, since ${P_c(z)\approx z^2}$ for ${|z|\gg 1}$, one has that ${\infty}$ attracts the orbit ${\{P_c^n(z)\}_{n\in\mathbb{N}}}$ of any ${z\in\mathbb{C}}$ with ${|z|\gg 1}$.

This means that the interesting dynamics of ${P_c}$ occurs in the filled-in Julia set:

$\displaystyle K(c):=\{z\in\mathbb{C}: P_c^n(z)\not\rightarrow\infty \textrm{ as } n\rightarrow\infty\}$

Note that ${K(c)}$ is totally invariant, that is, ${P_c(K(c)) = K(c) = P_c^{-1}(K(c))}$. Also, ${K(c)}$ is a compact set because ${|z|>R}$ implies that ${|P_c(z)|>R|z|-|c|>(R-\frac{|c|}{R})|z|}$ and ${R-\frac{|c|}{R}>1}$ whenever ${R>\frac{1+\sqrt{1+4|c|}}{2}:=R_c}$, so that

$\displaystyle K(c)=\bigcap\limits_{n\in\mathbb{N}} P_c^{-n}(\mathbb{D}_{R_c}(0))$

(where ${\mathbb{D}_R(0):=\{z\in\mathbb{C}: |z|\leq R\}}$).

Moreover, ${K(c)\neq\emptyset}$ because it contains all periodic points of ${P_c}$ (i.e., all solutions of the algebraic equations ${P_c^n(z)=z}$, ${n\in\mathbb{N}}$).

Remark 2 ${K(c)}$ is a full compact set, i.e., ${\mathbb{C}-K(c)}$ is connected: indeed, this happens because the maximum principle implies that a bounded open set ${U\subset \mathbb{C}}$ with boundary ${\partial U\subset K(c)}$ must be completely contained in ${K(c)}$ (i.e., ${U\subset K(c)}$).

The dynamics of ${P_c}$ on ${K(c)}$ is influenced by the behaviour of the orbit ${\{P_c^n(0)\}_{n\in\mathbb{N}}}$ of the critical point ${0\in\mathbb{C}}$. More precisely, let us consider the Mandelbrot set

$\displaystyle M:=\{c\in\mathbb{C}:P_c^n(0)\not\rightarrow\infty\}:=\{c\in\mathbb{C}: 0\in K(c)\}$